Deep Student v0.9.44 Release Notes
v0.9.44 follows up the learning-OS milestone with 52 commits: VLM grounding reliability, prompt-cache cost optimization, the DeepSeek Responses API, mobile UX alignment, and a hardened release pipeline.
Highlights
🖼️ VLM Grounding & OCR
- Multi-candidate model fallback for VLM grounding: grounding requests now fail over across candidate models (Qwen3-VL / GLM-4.6V) instead of erroring out
- OCR improvements: corrected model-version mapping for Qwen3-VL-8B and GLM-4.6V OCR engines, plus Linux PDFium support so PDF preview / text extraction / OCR work on Linux
💬 AI Chat
- Prompt-cache replay consistency: cross-turn requests are now replayed byte-identically to what was sent live (tool-call IDs, pre-tool text, and exact LLM-visible content are persisted). DeepSeek/OpenAI prefix caches hit far more often, cutting per-turn cost — with a new token-weighted cache hit-rate report (
scripts/cache-hit-report.py) to track it - DeepSeek official Responses API is now the default path, with server-side
web_search(deep search fixes) returning cited sources - Session-settings toggle semantics fixed; top bar alignment unified across search / commands / overview / data management
📱 Mobile
- Learning resource panel drops its secondary top bar; multi-select actions moved to the global top bar
- Three-panel swipe layout no longer scrolls horizontally (fixes
scrollLeftpollution causing whole-view offset) - "All conversations" entry removed; scrollbar contract enforced repo-wide
🤖 Android
- Guarded desktop-only browser APIs to prevent crashes in the Android WebView
🏗️ Engineering
- Release pipeline hardening: strict migration gate with fixture tiers, fail-closed manifest validation, unsigned-recovery paths for macOS/Windows, updater artifact naming with version, pdfium download retries, and multi-arch verification
- Version metadata baseline advanced to v0.9.44
⚠️ Notes
- macOS builds are unsigned (not notarized) and Windows builds have no Authenticode signature — same recovery path used for v0.9.43, since the Apple/Windows signing certificates are not configured in this repository. Gatekeeper may warn on first launch on macOS.
- Android APK is included; desktop release does not depend on it.