ThinkWatch Core 0.50.0

This release lets Claude Desktop's third-party mode use the gateway, cleans the extensions DeepSeek Harness adds to its requests before they reach an upstream other than DeepSeek, reads the GLM Coding Plan quota of Z.ai and BigModel upstreams, and recognises requests from Antigravity CLI. A gateway bound to a network interface now starts even when that interface is not there yet.

Upgrade notes

• The format of the request history changed (request store schema 21, from 20). On its first start, 0.50.0 replaces the request history and the stored request and response bodies of an earlier version with an empty store; the configuration is kept. Switching back to an earlier version empties it again.
• The control-plane protocol version (CONTROL_API_VERSION) is now 23. ThinkWatch Lite connects only to a core with the same protocol version, and has to regenerate its protocol types from this release to use it. ThinkWatch Lite 2026.9.17 includes 0.49.0 (protocol 22) and does not connect to 0.50.0: a server used with it stays on 0.49.x until the app is updated to a release that includes 0.50.0. sudo twcore upgrade --version 0.49.1 --restart switches a server back to 0.49.1.
• New in the protocol: QuotaWindow.credits (a new type, QuotaCredits { total, used, remaining }), the quota window monthly, and session_log_bytes on RequestStarted and HistoryRow. New message code: gw.files.unsupported.
• /v1/files and /files now answer 404 on the gateway instead of being forwarded to an upstream.

Claude Desktop. Claude Desktop in third-party inference mode, and the Claude Code engine it embeds, expect a few things of a gateway:

• HEAD /api/hello, the probe Desktop sends at startup, is answered with 200 by the gateway itself, without a key and without reaching an upstream. It used to be refused with 401.
• The client gives up on a stream that is silent for about five minutes. When a client speaking Anthropic Messages has received nothing for 15 seconds, the gateway writes event: ping, so a converted upstream that is reasoning or queued at length no longer looks like a dead connection. The timer runs from the last bytes the client received, not from the upstream's, because conversion drops the upstream's own keep-alive comments. Pings go only between frames, are not recorded in the stored body or counted as output, and are never sent to clients of other formats. After ten minutes without a byte from the upstream the gateway stops pinging, so a half-open upstream connection ends on the client's timer instead of lasting forever.
• /v1/models answers Anthropic clients in the Anthropic shape: type, display_name, created_at, has_more, first_id and last_id, and, for models whose id reads as Claude, anthropic_family_tier, which Desktop uses to resolve aliases such as sonnet. The OpenAI fields stay on the objects, because clients that send only x-api-key are also read as Anthropic.

DeepSeek Harness. DeepSeek Harness sends DeepSeek's extensions to whichever base URL it is given: top-level dsh_* fields, among them a session log of the whole conversation of up to 8 MiB per request, role: system entries in messages, tool_addition and tool_removal blocks with defer_loading tools, thinking enabled without a budget, and x-deepseek-harness-* headers. A request is recognised by its User-Agent or a dsh_* field. To DeepSeek's official endpoint it goes through unchanged. To any other upstream, every request from it, including count_tokens, has the dsh_* fields removed, its system entries appended to system in order, the tool change blocks and defer_loading removed and listed on the hop as a conversion lists what it drops, and a thinking without a budget rewritten to what the model accepts. The x-deepseek-harness-* headers are not forwarded, and the tool changes beta is taken out of anthropic-beta, with every line of a header sent on several lines kept. session_log_bytes gives the size of the session log a request carried, so the app can show that it carried one. /v1/files and /files answer 404: a file uploaded to the upstream picked at that moment cannot be used by a later request routed to another, and the 404 makes DeepSeek Harness send images inline.

GLM Coding Plan quota. An upstream whose base_url host is api.z.ai or open.bigmodel.cn is read as a GLM Coding Plan upstream. Its responses carry no quota headers, so GET /quota asks the account's quota endpoint for each enabled one that is due (at most once a minute, waiting up to 5 seconds), and traffic to one asks at most every 5 minutes; failures back off from 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Windows are 5h, weekly and monthly (the monthly MCP calls of the older plans), told apart by their length, and a reset time beyond a window's length is dropped. Credit-based plans report credits with the three numbers the endpoint gives. A 429 carrying a used-up quota code marks the window used up and emits QuotaExhausted. A key without a plan is left alone for an hour, and a key that had a quota needs two no-plan answers in a row before it is believed, because a transient server error returns the same code.

Antigravity CLI. Antigravity CLI sends the Go genai SDK's default user agent. A user agent that starts with google-genai-sdk and carries Google's internal Go toolchain (gl-go/ followed by cl/) is now reported as the client antigravity-cli. Programs built on the SDK with a public Go release are not.

Listening on an interface that is not there yet. When listen.gateway.bind names a network interface that does not exist or is offline, or an address that is not on this machine yet, twcore used to exit at startup. The gateway now listens on 127.0.0.1 only and says why in the listen status (gw.listen.no_such_nic, gw.listen.nic_offline), asks the system again every three seconds, adds the interface once it appears, moves to its new address when it changes, and drops back to loopback when it goes away. This lets the desktop app on Windows bind the gateway to the WSL adapter, which appears only once WSL has started and changes address on every restart. A loopback that cannot be bound is still fatal at startup.

Downloads

Platform	Binary	Archive for server installation
Linux, x86_64	twcore-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu	twcore-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
Linux, aarch64	twcore-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu	twcore-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz
macOS, Apple silicon	twcore-aarch64-apple-darwin	—
Windows, x64	twcore-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe	—
Windows, ARM64	twcore-aarch64-pc-windows-msvc.exe	—

Each file is published with a .sha256 file beside it. A Linux archive contains twcore, the systemd unit twcore.service and LICENSE. ThinkWatch Lite includes its own copy of twcore; the files here are for running core separately, such as on a server.

Server installation

On Linux (x86_64 or aarch64), the install script sets up twcore as a systemd service. This installs 0.50.0:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThinkWatchProject/ThinkWatch-Core/main/scripts/install.sh | sudo sh -s -- --version 0.50.0

An installation made with the script switches to 0.50.0 with:

sudo twcore upgrade --version 0.50.0 --restart

Configuration, the remote control port and connecting ThinkWatch Lite are described in docs/server.md.

Verifying a download

A .sha256 file holds the SHA-256 of the file followed by its name. With both files in the current directory, on Linux:

sha256sum -c twcore-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz.sha256

On macOS:

shasum -a 256 -c twcore-aarch64-apple-darwin.sha256

On Windows, in PowerShell, the following prints True when the binary matches:

(Get-FileHash .\twcore-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe).Hash -eq (Get-Content .\twcore-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe.sha256).Split()[0]

The install script and twcore upgrade check the SHA-256 themselves.

What's Changed

• feat(gateway): meet what Claude Desktop's third-party mode asks of a gateway by @fylorn in #203
• feat(quota): read the GLM Coding Plan quota for Z.ai and BigModel upstreams by @fylorn in #204
• feat(gateway): clean DeepSeek Harness requests for non-DeepSeek upstreams by @fylorn in #205
• fix(gateway): start on loopback when the interface to listen on is not there yet by @fylorn in #206
• feat(gateway): recognise Antigravity CLI requests as antigravity-cli by @fylorn in #207
• fix: pre-release review fixes for pings, DeepSeek Harness cleaning and GLM quota by @fylorn in #208
• chore: v0.50.0 by @fylorn in #209

Full Changelog: v0.49.1...v0.50.0