ThinkWatch Lite 2026.10.29

Upgrade notes:

• The bundled core is now 0.83.1 and the control-plane protocol is 54. A remote server running an older core must be upgraded to 0.83.0 or later to stay connected.
• Nothing is cleared; the request history, stored payloads and settings carry over.
• A routing rule that turned extended thinking on or off (thinking: under the rule's set) no longer loads, and the app opens in safe mode. Repair removes the field; set the rule's Reasoning again afterwards (Off corresponds to the old "off").
• Updating to this version still restarts the gateway the previous way. Seamless upgrades apply from the next update on.

Temporary upstream failures are retried:

• When an upstream fails before the answer starts, because it is overloaded, returns a server error, cannot be reached or drops the connection, the gateway waits 2, 4, 8, then 16 seconds and sends the request again, also when that upstream is the only one. Other upstreams are tried first, and a longer wait asked for by the upstream is respected.
• Retrying stops at Settings > Failover > Wait at most (120 seconds by default), which now covers queueing and retrying together. Setting it to 0 turns both off.
• An answer that has already started is never sent again. Errors caused by the request itself, an exhausted quota, rejected credentials or a rate limit are not retried.
• Traffic shows a request as Retrying while it waits, and the request details mark each retry and how long it waited.

Reasoning effort in routing rules:

• A rule can set Reasoning to Off or to a level from low to max, for example to keep requests that Claude Code sends to a GLM upstream at max. A level only changes requests that already have reasoning on.
• When an upstream rejects a reasoning level, the request is sent again once with a level the upstream accepts, and the choice is remembered for that upstream and model. The request details say when and why the level was changed.

Seamless upgrades:

• Updates no longer stop the gateway port or cut requests in flight. The running core hands its sockets to the new core and finishes its requests before it exits. Restart Gateway works the same way.
• Homebrew upgrades are recognised and handled like an in-app update. After an update the window comes back as it was.
• The overview and the menu bar count the requests the previous core is still finishing.

Traffic:

• Answers, thinking and system prompts in the request details and in conversations render their Markdown: headings, bold, lists, tables and code blocks. HTML in an answer is shown as text, links are not clickable and images are not loaded.

Downloads

Platform	File
macOS, Apple silicon	ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-darwin-arm64.dmg
Windows, x64, installer	ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-windows-x64-setup.exe
Windows, x64, portable	ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-windows-x64-portable.zip
Windows, ARM64, installer	ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-windows-arm64-setup.exe
Windows, ARM64, portable	ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-windows-arm64-portable.zip
Linux, x86_64	ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-linux-x86_64.AppImage
Linux, aarch64	ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-linux-aarch64.AppImage

Each file is published with a .sha256 file beside it. latest.json is the manifest for in-app updates, and install.sh is the Linux install script.

On Windows, the portable ZIP runs without installation or administrator rights: extract it to any writable folder and start ThinkWatch Lite.exe. Its settings stay in the data folder beside it, separate from an installed copy, and it updates itself in place.

On macOS, Homebrew installs the same disk image:

brew install --cask thinkwatchproject/tap/thinkwatch-lite

On Linux, the install script downloads the AppImage for the machine's architecture, checks its SHA-256 and installs it as ~/Applications/ThinkWatch-Lite.AppImage:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/ThinkWatchProject/ThinkWatch-Lite/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh

Both commands install the latest release. First-launch steps for each platform, such as removing the quarantine attribute from a copy downloaded on macOS, are described in the README.

The ThinkWatch Lite page describes each feature, and the documentation covers installing, connecting clients and routing.

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 macOS:

shasum -a 256 -c ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-darwin-arm64.dmg.sha256

On Linux:

sha256sum -c ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-linux-x86_64.AppImage.sha256

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

(Get-FileHash .\ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-windows-x64-setup.exe).Hash -eq (Get-Content .\ThinkWatch-Lite-2026.10.29-windows-x64-setup.exe.sha256).Split()[0]

The Homebrew cask and the Linux install script check the SHA-256 themselves.

What's Changed

• Seamless upgrades: hand the running core over instead of stopping it; pin core v0.82.0 by @fylorn in #368
• Update vite, vitest and hono past their Dependabot alerts by @fylorn in #369
• Traffic: render model-written Markdown in answers, thinking and system prompts by @fylorn in #370
• 2026.10.29: retry temporary upstream failures, reasoning effort in routing rules; pin core v0.83.1 by @fylorn in #372

Full Changelog: v2026.10.28...v2026.10.29