v7.4.0

AX Code v7.4.0

Released July 27, 2026 · Full changelog

v7.4.0 widens the agent toolset with image generation, live monitoring, and
notebook editing, adds a set of built-in workflow skills, and introduces managed
vs. attach connection modes for AX Engine — alongside substantial TUI and
Desktop resilience work.

Highlights

• New agent tools — image_gen generates a high-fidelity image from a prompt and
  returns it as an attachment; monitor runs a background shell as a live event source,
  turning each stdout/stderr line into a real-time session notification (with optional
  regex filter and persistent mode); notebook_edit replaces, inserts, or deletes cells
  in a Jupyter .ipynb.
• Built-in workflow skills — loop runs a prompt or slash command on a recurring
  interval, run launches and drives the project's app, simplify reviews changed code
  for reuse/quality/efficiency, and verify confirms a change behaves by running the app
  and observing it.
• AX Engine connection modes — choose Managed (AX Code owns the lifecycle:
  prepare model → spawn ax-engine serve → health → chat) or Attach (point at a
  server you already run via baseURL + apiKey). Both TUI and Desktop validate an
  attach before saving and never start, reload, or stop a server in attach mode.
• Schema-driven help — the TUI help dialog is now generated from the keybind schema,
  so it can't drift from the real bindings.

New features

• feat(core): image_gen, monitor, and notebook_edit agent tools, plus loop,
  run, simplify, and verify built-in skills.
• feat(ax-engine): managed and attach connection modes for the local engine.
• feat(tui): managed-vs-attach mode selector and a keybind-schema-generated help dialog.

Improvements

• perf(tui): streaming paint interval now scales with document length, keeping long
  sessions responsive.
• perf(desktop): the file-type icon sprite loads as an asset instead of inline JS.
• refactor(desktop): extracted draft persistence and mentions from ChatInput; editor
  content and tree utils from FilesView; tab and preview helpers from ContextPanel;
  snapshot-equality and event routing from sync-context; tool formatting and task
  summary from ToolPart.
• refactor(tui): unified session-list dialogs and capped expanded tool output.

Fixes

• TUI resilience: the session stays alive on unhandled rejections and surfaces backend
  death instead of hanging; session truncation, connection state, and toast storms are now
  visible and rate-limited; child-session navigation moved off plain arrow keys.
• Desktop resilience: recovery from renderer crashes with startup-failure display;
  mermaid SVG is sanitized; loading states standardized; hardcoded toast strings routed
  through i18n; session-action failures self-surface; the provider-tracker interval is lazy.
• Tests / isolation: inherited isolation env vars are cleared in os-sandbox and prompt
  isolation tests; renderer crash-cleanup assertions pinned to alternate-screen mode;
  localStorage polyfilled in the UI test setup for Node >= 22.

Release pipeline

• Finalize the Desktop release without a checkout; trust the Homebrew tap in install smoke.
• Harden the new tools and renderer-recovery paths before publishing.

Install and verify

Signed archives are attached to this release for darwin-arm64, windows-x64, and
windows-arm64, plus install.ps1. Verify any asset against the published
ax-minisign.pub using the steps in the release verification guide.