gentle-pi v4.4.0 — Gentle Design, Local Voice Dictation, and Gentle AI v4.3.1

Gentle Shell v4.4.0 is a feature release. It adds Gentle Design, a provider-free local design canvas; optional local voice dictation; image paste in the editor; /gentle:music; and a super-yolo permission mode. It shares one global Engram server across sessions, makes the shell noticeably lighter per keystroke, and pins Gentle AI v4.3.1. The npm package remains gentle-pi.

Provenance

• Previous stable: v4.3.0 → d5d692a6888da9e9844e7e443ee30991fa4b9d14
• Release target: v4.4.0 → b6c301c41b426ebb09cbd9dc3309cfceedcc1820
• Release validation: run 40565556276 passed package verification, published gentle-pi@4.4.0 to npm with provenance, and built, verified and attached the installers on Ubuntu, Windows and macOS.
• Pinned Gentle AI: v4.3.1 (2dba778); the review provider contract remains unchanged at 1.4.0, and the negotiated capability identity is unchanged.

What's new

Gentle Design

/gentle:design and the gentle-design skill write self-contained HTML design directions under design/<slug>/ and open them on a local canvas. The canvas supports pinned comments with batch send and screenshots, navigation and focus modes, a design system board synced from the project's design tokens before the first design, and a handoff from an artboard to code that reports implementation progress and links designs to ODD features. It needs no external design provider.

Included work: #2562 (issue #2561), #2571.

Local voice dictation

Optional local dictation with Parakeet transcribes speech into the editor without a cloud service. Holding Space dictates when the push-to-talk toggle is on.

Included work: #2416 (issue #2413), #2418 (issue #2414).

Image paste, music, and the Agents rail

Pasted images become attachment chips with a preview, including on WSL. /gentle:music plays gentle-stream inside Gentle Shell. The fullscreen rail shows the Agents card with a collapsible header.

Included work: #2467 (issue #2464), #2496 (issue #2495), #2526 (issue #2525).

Super-yolo permission mode

A session-scoped super-yolo mode waives every permission dialog for the live primary session, except reads of private paths such as .env files, SSH keys, keychains and cloud credentials, which stay refused. It never answers provider consent or user questions on the human's behalf.

Included work: #2453 (issue #2452).

Session profiles

Profiles gain a disk corroboration reader, an append controller with failure quarantine, and controller lifecycle seams; the orchestrator model can be selected explicitly, and role and model_profiles keys that match no discovered agent are surfaced instead of silently ignored.

Included work: #1922, #1948, #1984, #2214 (issue #1478), #2397, #2405 (issue #2400), #2480, #2187.

A lighter shell

The status bar model, the changes digest and the changes widget paint are no longer rebuilt on every keystroke; presence publication is coalesced to the render cadence and its ancestor validation is asynchronous; the context backstop samples once per window; the working animation runs from real frames with a silence watchdog; the review mutation-ledger scan, the permission identity and the startup release lookup are cached; the task store and scratch ledger are bounded; and notifications reuse one persistent audio worker.

Included work: #2506 (issue #1681), #2521 (issue #2517), #2522 (issue #2518), #2524 (issue #2520), #2529 (issue #994), #2532 (issue #2530), #2533 (issue #2531), #2537 (issue #2519), #2542 (issue #2540), #2546 (issue #2543), #2547 (issue #2544), #2548 (issue #2545), #2551 (issue #2549).

Gentle AI v4.3.1 pin

Gentle Shell now installs and negotiates with Gentle AI v4.3.1, and the double-click installers embed it. See Pinned runtime.

Included work: #2587 (issue #2585).

What was fixed

One shared Engram server

Each session started its own Engram server. Sessions now share the global Engram server, its detached temp directory stays outside session scratch, and binding diagnostics are exposed without leaking private data.

Included work: #2481 (issue #2360), #2534 (issue #2468), #2415 (issue #2412).

Orchestration ceremony and review routing

Small tasks no longer pay for always-on ceremony, a Risk declaration that opens a sentence is admitted, refuter and validator use Pi's default model when unrouted, reviewer config typed before the binary resolves is refused, assessment continuations are clear when RDD is off, and answer-consent object input is serialized.

Included work: #2457, #2460, #2479 (issue #2271), #2494 (issue #2256), #2527 (issue #2500), #2387 (issue #2375).

Agents and subagents

Settled agents get an orderly shutdown before termination escalates; presence discovery ignores foreign-schema files and garbage-collects stale records when it overflows its cap; background capability is refused when the policy is off; forward-slash Windows repository_root values are accepted; and the current alias follows the published work topic.

Included work: #1775 (issue #1740), #2434 (issue #2433), #2502 (issue #2501), #2509, #2325 (issue #2314), #2554 (issue #2553).

Install, update, launcher and Windows

The main channel accepts a Gentle AI main commit that is a release tag, reinstalls from its recorded tarball, and installs a moved Shell when the Gentle AI step fails; updates show the package manager's error; Windows acquires the pinned Go when Gentle AI is already installed and hides the consoles of the last internal git launches; the launcher refuses cmd.exe arguments with a double quote and drops only the bundled npmCommand; storage metadata is read through native attributes; and companion updates stay under ordinary permission checks.

Included work: #2340 (issue #2301), #2347 (issue #2324), #2358 (issue #2356), #2374 (issue #2371), #2490 (issue #2489), #2445 (issue #967), #2484 (issue #2425), #2472 (issue #2469), #2474, #2470, #2381 (issue #2380).

Shell, editor and skills

External editor paths are passed without a shell; rail sections repaint on theme change; worktree-holder roots with no commits are skipped with one quiet hint and the unborn-HEAD hint stays out of the idle bar; a stale clipboard image read is discarded; ask_user_choice transcripts include custom responses; the skill registry discovers category-nested skills and keeps regenerating without watch events; and NaN DeepSeek output limits are honored.

Included work: #2536 (issue #2426), #2569 (issue #2568), #2483 (issue #2482), #2508 (issue #2507), #2473, #1776 (issue #1692), #572 (issue #304), #2488 (issue #2485), #2359 (issue #2357).

Pinned runtime

Gentle Shell pins Gentle AI v4.3.1 from module github.com/gentleman-programming/gentle-ai/v4: signed, SHA-256-pinned release archives on Darwin and Linux (amd64/arm64), and a Go SumDB-verified source build of the exact tag on Windows x64/arm64. The review provider contract remains unchanged at 1.4.0. A new NATIVE_CLI_CONTRACTS row 4.3.1 repeats 4.2.0 because the binary still advertises capabilities/v2.6; no new capability identity is asserted. The gentle-ai v4.3.0 tag has no release and is not pinned.

Breaking changes

None. Existing ODD, SDD, review, and package interfaces remain compatible.

Upgrade

pi install npm:gentle-pi@4.4.0

Restart Pi, then run gentle-ai sync so the managed orchestrator assets match the pinned runtime.

Numbers

126 non-merge commits, 72 merged pull requests, and 13 unique GitHub PR authors since v4.3.0.

Verification

• CI on the pin PR #2587: test (ubuntu-24.04, windows-latest), installer (ubuntu, macOS, Windows), review-repository-windows, session-transport-macos and verify all passed.
• node scripts/verify-package-files.mjs: passed (236 files; 69 exact byte-pinned contract artifacts for the v4.3.1 runtime).
• node scripts/test-packed-runner.mjs: packed package E2E passed against the published Gentle AI v4.3.1 release assets.
• npm pack --dry-run: gentle-pi@4.4.0, 962 files.
• Double-click installers: gentle-shell-installer-macos.zip, gentle-shell-installer-windows.zip and gentle-shell-installer-linux.tar.gz downloaded from the public release links all match gentle-shell-installers-SHA256SUMS.txt; the bundled installer/package.json is 4.4.0 and embeds Gentle AI 4.3.1.

Install

pi install npm:gentle-pi@4.4.0

Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/gentle-pi

Full changelog: v4.3.0...v4.4.0