v0.4.0

Nexus v0.4.0 — Desktop companion awareness foundation

Stable. This release starts the v0.4 desktop companion awareness line with
a quiet observation foundation. It keeps the companion continuity path
privacy-bounded and deliberately does not expand into proactive check-ins or
v0.5 desktop pet behavior.

What changes for users

Nexus can keep quiet companionship continuity

When desktop context awareness is enabled, Nexus is open, and the user is
active elsewhere instead of directly chatting with Nexus, Nexus can keep a
short-lived companion awareness summary.

That summary is deliberately small:

• a broad activity class
• a rough elapsed-time bucket
• whether the user appears focused
• whether Nexus should stay silent

The purpose is companionship continuity. Nexus should not behave like a
stopwatch, productivity monitor, screen recorder, or autonomous work agent.

The summary is session-bound

The recent companion summary is scoped to the current app session and renderer
lifecycle. Nexus drops the stored summary if it belongs to another session,
was written by a previous renderer lifecycle, predates the current session, is
older than the hard 24-hour safety cap, appears to come from the future, or
fails schema validation.

This prevents a previous desktop activity stretch from being replayed later as
current context.

Settings keeps the privacy boundary visible

Memory settings explains:

• what desktop companion awareness can observe
• what is stored locally
• what reaches the model
• how to pause companion awareness
• how to clear the recent companion summary

Pausing companion awareness, disabling context awareness, or clearing the recent
summary removes the local recent summary.

Privacy boundary

Allowed:

• sanitized companion summaries
• broad activity classes
• rough time buckets
• short-lived recent summary metadata

Not allowed:

• raw screenshots
• full OCR dumps
• full clipboard contents
• private message bodies
• private file paths
• exact timers or timestamp trails
• hidden activity logs
• productivity scoring

Out of scope

This stable release does not include:

• proactive check-in expansion
• new desktop sensing sources
• mouse-following, typing-following, or desktop pet window control
• productivity dashboards or raw activity timelines
• automatic mouse or keyboard control
• file reading, app opening, message sending, or settings changes without
  explicit user action

Distribution notes

Until Nexus has signed installers and notarized macOS distribution, local
manual installs may still show platform trust prompts:

• macOS may show Gatekeeper or quarantine warnings. If you intentionally
  downloaded the app from the official GitHub Release, remove quarantine only
  for that downloaded app bundle.
• Windows may show SmartScreen warnings because the installer is not yet backed
  by broad code-signing reputation.

Do not download installers from mirrors or reposted archives.

Validation focus

This stable release is prepared against:

• npm run verify:release
• npm run package:dir:smoke
• npm run desktop-context-privacy:audit
• npm run message-privacy:audit
• npm run error-redaction:audit
• npm run ipc:audit
• npm run distribution:audit
• npm run prerelease-check -- v0.4.0

The stable handoff is
Nexus v0.4.0 Stable Release Checklist.