Aster 0.5.0

Aster 0.5.0

Aster 0.5.0 is out. Aster runs inside Zed, the agent's own conduct skills go internal, the web tools work the way they were described, and the desktop app gets its new interface.

Install or upgrade in one line:

curl -fsSL https://withaster.dev/install | sh

Already installed? aster upgrade.

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Aster in Zed

aster acp serves the agent over the Agent Client Protocol, so Zed's External Agents menu drives the full agent: streamed replies and thoughts, tool calls with diffs and file locations, plans, approvals and questions as permission prompts, cancel, and thread resume. Each thread has pickers for the permission mode, provider, model, and effort. Setup is one entry in Zed's settings.json; see editors/zed/README.md.

Internal skills

Skills that shape how the agent works, rather than what it can do for you, now live in an internal/ folder. Eleven built-ins and eight of the bundled optional skills moved there. The model still loads them on demand, but they never appear in aster skills list, the /skills picker, the session header, or the status count, and reading one is never shown as a step in the chat. Put your own under <skills root>/internal/<name>/ and they are treated the same way.

Web tools that do what they say

• web/sitemap never worked: the schema asked for domain and the code read url. Fixed.
• web/crawl ignored every option it advertised. Page limits, depth, URL filters, and main-content extraction all take effect.
• web/screenshot returns the picture itself, so the agent can look at a page instead of receiving a link it cannot open.
• The five built-in web tools are pinned into the tool inventory, so a large MCP catalogue no longer costs a search round before a web search.
• Search and extraction work on a fresh install with no key, through Firecrawl's keyless tier with DuckDuckGo and a plain fetch behind it.

Images for models that cannot see

When the session model takes no image input, attached images are described by a vision model and the description stands in for them. ASTER_VISION_MODEL picks the model.

VS Code and Cursor

• Clicking a file under "Edited", in a review, on a tool row, or on a mention opens the file in an editor tab. It used to open a preview inside the panel.
• File links in replies, including file:// and #L42 forms, and cited paths such as src/panel.ts:486 open the file at that line. They used to go to the OS, which reported "No application found to open URL".
• Cmd+F finds text in the conversation, in the editor tab and in the sidebar.
• Drag a file from the Explorer, an editor tab, or the Finder into the composer; paste an image and it attaches with a thumbnail.

Desktop

The app's own interface is rebuilt on the design system the editor panel uses: a sidebar of conversations, a toolbar with the diff view and a command menu, provider and model pickers, a settings page, a home view, an in-app update control, and a setup card with the install command when the CLI is missing.

Also

• aster key lists, sets, and unsets every API key Aster reads, without hand-editing .env.
• aster init can point at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint and asks about every web provider.
• The agent can forget a memory by name.
• aster remind "text" "in 10s" accepts seconds.
• The agent knows the aster binary is on its PATH and reaches reminders, schedules, skill installs, and MCP toggles from a command when no tool covers them.
• Pasted files in the browser UI keep their original names, and image and document mentions show a preview card.

The full list is in CHANGELOG.md.