Cortex 1.5.0

Cortex 1.5.0

A coaching release: a Practice tab that reads your own sessions and points out habits worth changing, a Discover page for finding and installing community skills without leaving the app, and a menu bar that tells you when a session needs you.

New

• Practice - what your sessions say about your habits. A new tab on the Health page runs nine detectors entirely on-device over your recent sessions and surfaces what to change: never using plan mode, heavy interrupting, missing or bloated CLAUDE.md files, context hygiene, tool-error loops, no skills or hooks configured, no subagents, and MCP servers you configured but never call. Findings are grouped by category (planning, context, memory, hooks, skills, subagents, MCP), ranked by severity, and each one can be dismissed once you have read it.

• Discover - a catalog of community setups. Browse skills, agents, commands, hooks, CLIs, CLAUDE.md files, guides, and collections pulled from public GitHub repositories. The catalog is read live over the public GitHub API, unauthenticated and read-only.

• One-click install. Install anything from Discover straight into a destination you pick. Cortex only ever writes inside that destination's .claude directory, tells you when a target already exists, and asks before overwriting.

• Repo detail. Open any repository for its own health metrics and configuration in a dedicated sheet.

Improved

• Menu bar. A sound plays when a session is waiting on your input, and sessions and workflows that have stopped are pruned from the panel sooner, so the list reflects what is actually running.
• Menu bar reliability. The app now uses the bundle identifier com.cortex.desktop and migrates your preferences from the previous domain once, on first launch. This resolves a case where the status item could stop appearing.

Fixed

• "Keep in Menu Bar" now really means menu bar only. Choosing it at the quit prompt used to close the window while leaving the app in the Dock with nothing behind the icon. The app now drops its Dock icon and returns it whenever the window is reopened. Thanks to @pujayana for the fix.

Notes

• Built from source; the attached Cortex.dmg is unsigned (no Apple Developer ID). On first launch, right-click the app and choose Open to get past Gatekeeper. Requires macOS 15+.