Bellows 1.10.8

Opening a project puts you in it

Opening or creating a project now takes you straight to a session in that
folder: the one already open there, or a new one. Before, the chat stayed
pointed at the previous project, so asking about "this" could send your agent
off to search the wrong one. New session now asks which project first,
with the open one already selected, so Ctrl+T then Enter still gets you going.
The Live sessions list shows each session's folder.

Steer a run without stopping it

Type while Claude is working and your message goes in straight away. Claude
reads it at its next step, so you can redirect a run without stopping it.
When a permission request is waiting, whatever you type answers it: the
request is denied and your words tell Claude what to do instead.

Deny with reason works

Deny with reason, Allow & remember, and pasting the sign-in callback
for an MCP server all opened no box at all. Each now opens a proper dialog,
and a denial shows the reason you gave.

Suggested replies

After a turn, one-click replies appear above the message box: Claude's own
guess at what you'll say next, and "Yes, go ahead" when it has just asked you
something. Click one to send it, or press Tab to edit it first.

Less wall of text

When Claude narrates at length on its way to a tool call, that narration now
folds to a few faded lines with Show all to open it. The final answer is
always shown in full. Collapsible sections Claude writes appear as real
collapsible blocks rather than raw tags.

Also fixed

• ACP agents distributed through npx now start on Windows, and ACP sessions
  report their cost.
• Get Bellows on the website no longer fails for a few minutes after
  each release.

Bellows 1.10.7

"Working" sits under the conversation

While an agent is busy, the "Working" line and its timer now appear beneath
the conversation, not inside the box you type in. To stop a turn, press the
Stop button where Send usually is, or press Esc.

The walkthrough's keep-a-tool example reads properly

On bellowsai.app, step six of the walkthrough drew its example on top of
itself once you kept the tool, ran it and shared it. It now lays out cleanly,
on a phone too.

Bellows 1.10.6

Bellows for macOS and Linux

This is the first release with installers for macOS and Linux as well as
Windows.

• macOS (Apple silicon): a disk image. Drag Bellows to Applications. The
  first time you open it, right-click it and choose Open, then Open
  again. It cannot update itself yet, so when a new version is out Bellows
  tells you and takes you to the download.
• Linux: an AppImage, and a .deb for Debian and Ubuntu. Updates install
  themselves, and each one is checked against the project's signature first,
  as on Windows.

Get Bellows downloads Bellows

The download button on the website now starts the download for your
computer straight away, instead of sending you to a list of files. The
downloads page shows every platform with its current version and size.

Bellows 1.10.5

Updates always reach you

Copies of Bellows from 1.9.3 to 1.10.3 could download an update and never
offer to install it, because the fault that stopped the left-hand buttons
working also stopped the update prompt appearing. If you are on one of those
versions, install this one by hand from the Bellows releases page; from here
on, updates look after themselves.

Three changes make sure that cannot happen again:

• Bellows asks you itself. When an update is downloaded and its signature
  checks out, and the window has not started properly, Bellows shows its own
  "Update ready" dialog, which does not depend on the window.
• Installed for all users? A copy installed for everyone on the machine
  now asks once for permission to update. It used to download each update and
  quietly fail to install it.
• Every release is started before it ships. Bellows is now opened in a
  real window, and must start cleanly, before a release can be published.

The window moves when you drag it

With a session open, most of the bar across the top of the window ignored a
drag. Only a small strip round the name would move it, so Bellows felt stuck
in place, on one screen or between screens. The whole bar now moves the
window, apart from the tabs and buttons on it.

A new icon

The app, the taskbar and the installer now carry the Bellows mark, the same
five copper bars as the website, in place of the old gradient disc. It has
its own drawing at small sizes, so it stays sharp in the taskbar and in Start.

Bellows 1.10.4

The buttons on the left work again

Since 1.9.3, a fault while the window opened stopped Bellows wiring up most
of its own controls. The rail down the left, the account chip, Settings and
the command palette button looked normal and did nothing. Only the buttons
inside the chat window responded. Fixed, and a new automated check in Bellows'
test suite catches this kind of fault.

Signing in works the first time

Signing in to Claude could look like it failed until you closed and reopened
Bellows. The sign-in was often fine; the screen simply never updated. Each
attempt now starts cleanly, the window updates as soon as you are signed in,
and if the browser does not hand control back there is an I have signed
in button to check again.

New project

Alongside Open project, New project asks for a name and a place, makes the
folder and opens it. It is on the opening screen, in the Project panel and in
the command palette.

A faster start

The opening screen appears straight away instead of waiting on your agent,
and the welcome dialog no longer opens on top of it. The screen shows
three things to press, your recent projects, and whether an agent is signed
in. The setup checklist is still in the command palette.

A sharper look

Finer edges, layered surfaces and a cleaner type scale throughout, in both
themes. The message box is a single surface, and the left rail marks where
you are.

Bellows 1.10.3

Reporting a problem goes somewhere

Report a problem (in the command palette, under Help) opened a page that did not exist for anyone
outside the Bellows team, so a report you had taken the trouble to write had
nowhere to land. It now opens a new issue on the public Bellows releases
page, with your error log ready to paste, as it always should have.

The website says what is true

A few sentences on bellowsai.app had drifted from the product. The walkthrough
count now matches the walkthrough. The team console no longer mentions an
approved-tools list that does not exist. It also no longer suggests that a
task queued in the console runs on your machine: tasks are a shared board for
people, and nothing picks them up. Links that went to a private page now go
somewhere you can open.

Bellows 1.10.2

Tools have a place on the rail

Keeping a tool was the thing this release series is about, and it lived in
the command palette and nowhere you could see. Tools you keep is now on
the left rail with the rest of your work, and the guided tour points at it
instead of at the search icon in the corner.

Keep it is visible before you can press it

A tool is not kept until it has run in front of you on a file the agent has
not seen — that has not changed, and it is the point. But the Keep it
button used to be missing until then, which looks like something broken
rather than something waiting. It is now there from the start, greyed, and
says what it is waiting for.

The update notice showed its own markup

If you were offered this update by an older copy of Bellows, you may have seen
the release notes arrive as a wall of <h3> and <p> tags. Bellows was
handed the notes as HTML and read them as plain text.

Fixed here — which means the copy you are reading this in is the one that
had the problem, and the fix will show the next time an update is offered to
you.

Bellows 1.10.1

A door for the person who was sent a tool

If somebody sends you a tool, you install Bellows for that one reason — and
until now the first screen asked you to sign in to an agent, which is the one
thing you do not need. The opening screen now offers Open a tool someone sent
you, next to the tour and the examples.

The guided tour has a step on keeping the work, too, so the window explains the
same product the website does.

Bellows 1.10.0

Keep as a tool

Useful work used to end when the session did. Now, when an agent finishes a job
that works on files, Keep as a tool turns it into a small app with file
pickers and a Run button — one you can use again next week on next week's
files, and give to somebody else.

A kept tool is ordinary local code. Running it needs no agent, no account and
no AI charge. Changing it still uses your agent, as it should.

Merge two supplier price lists. Total a timesheet by person. Turn a folder of
exports into one clean import file. The kind of job that comes back every
month and is too small to be worth a project.

Nothing is kept until it has worked. "Keep it" appears only after the tool has
run in front of you on a file the agent never saw — a tool that has never
produced a right answer is not evidence of anything.

And work that cannot honestly become a tool is told so, in those words. A job
that needs the shell, the network, a login or the model itself stays a session.
It is never quietly turned back into an agent you pay for.

Give one to a colleague

Share… writes a single .bellows-tool file. Send it however you already
send things. Whoever receives it installs Bellows once — free — and opens the
file. No agent, no terminal, no provider account, nothing to configure.

Before anything is kept, they see what it is: what files it will ask for, what
it gives back, everything inside it, and where it came from. Opening a tool to
look at it does not run it.

The file is readable. It is plain text, and a tool's whole source is right
there in it, so anybody who wants to know what they have been sent can open it
and read it.

Does it do what it says? A tool can ship sample files and the results it
expects from them, and Check runs them and compares. So a tool from someone
else can be checked before you accept it, without reading a line of its code.
Its own tests travel with it too, for whoever wants to run the proof rather
than take your word.

An update never widens quietly. Replacing a tool you already have shows you
both versions and names anything the new one asks for that the old one did not,
and your copy is untouched until you say so.

The part you cannot see

A tool runs sealed off. It gets the bytes of the files you chose for that run
and nothing else — no network of any kind, no shell, no access to a file you
did not pick, and no way to reach anything else on your machine or any other
tool's data. It never learns where anything lives on your disk; you choose
where a result is saved, and nothing overwrites the file you started from.

There is a Stop button, and closing the window stops the run.

Two honest limits. A tool from somebody you do not trust is still a tool from
somebody you do not trust: Check tells you it does its job, not that it is
safe. And a copy you have sent cannot be recalled — giving somebody a file is
giving somebody a file.

Bellows 1.9.3

Bellows tells you what changed

Updates install themselves quietly in the background, and until now that was
all you ever knew about them. This window is the answer: after an update it
opens once, with the notes for everything released since you last looked, and
after that it lives in the command palette under What's new.

The update dialog shows the same notes for a version you have not installed
yet — so "should I take this update?" is a question you can actually answer.

There is nothing to fetch. The notes are inside the app, which means they are
there on a plane, on a train, and on the afternoon somebody else's server is
down.