io-cli 0.9.0

The session gains sight, in both directions.

You can show the agent a picture, and you can see the picture the agent looked
at, in the terminal you are already in rather than by going and opening a file.

Added

• /attach, which puts an image in front of the agent for the next turn and
  only the next turn. The path is read through io-harness's Workspace, which
  documents that as the same policy gate a source read passes rather than a
  second one — so an image the session may not read is refused exactly the way a
  file it may not read already is. The argument can be @-completed, because the
  path picker opens on @ after any whitespace and not only at an empty prompt.
• The picture the agent looked at, committed where it looked. Enabling
  io-harness's media feature puts its own view_image tool into the workspace
  tool set, so the agent gains the ability to look at images in this release.
  It is governed by the same policy as any other read, and when it does look, the
  same picture goes into your scrollback at that point in the conversation.
• Half-block rendering, which works on every terminal. ▀ splits a cell into
  two halves that are each about square, so a picture is drawn from the cells the
  terminal already has, fitted to its width and bounded in height.
• The real image where the terminal speaks the Kitty graphics protocol —
  kitty, ghostty, WezTerm and Konsole. Placed with C=1, which is what lets it
  sit inside a renderer that draws the cells around it.
• Background shell handles are named, counted and accounted for. A
  shell_start outlives the step that launched it, which is the whole point of
  it and the whole problem: a run waiting on a dev server looks exactly like a
  run that has hung. The command is named when it starts, a bg N field counts
  what is still alive, and each job says how it ended — exited with a status,
  killed, or left running by a run that finished first.

Changed

• io-harness is taken with features = ["media"]. The pin does not move; 0.9.0
  is still built against 0.65.
• image is the eleventh direct dependency, with default-features = false and
  exactly the nine formats io-harness will accept from a file. Its defaults would
  pull an AV1 encoder and rayon into a crate that only ever decodes a file the
  harness has already accepted.

Not in this release

• iTerm2's own inline-image protocol. Its escape has no equivalent of Kitty's
  C=1: it advances the cursor and may scroll, and a scroll changes what every
  later absolute cursor move in the same draw means. It probably lines up against
  a region of exactly the right height — but "probably" is not good enough when
  the failure lands in scrollback that no later redraw can clean. iTerm2 gets the
  cell form, which is a picture. Deferred to 0.10.0.
• Sixel. Encoding it means palette quantisation, which means another
  dependency, for terminals that either also speak Kitty or render half blocks
  correctly.
• The graphics path for jpeg, gif and webp. Kitty's f=100 is PNG, and the
  only base64 in reach is the one io-harness already computed — this crate takes
  no base64 dependency. Media::attach transcodes bmp, tiff, ico, tga and pnm to
  PNG on the way in, so those reach the graphics path along with png itself,
  while jpeg, gif and webp take the cell form.
• Any check that the chosen model accepts images, as opposed to the
  provider. Provider::accepts_images is asked before an attachment is
  accepted, but with OpenRouter in front of four hundred models that answer is
  yes while the model you picked may be text-only — and the failure then is the
  provider's own HTTP 404: No endpoints found that support image input, after
  the step and its tokens are spent. Found by running the built binary. It cannot
  be closed from here anyway: enabling images gave the agent view_image, and a
  tool in io-harness's workspace set is not io-cli's to remove.
• Anything the agent was given rather than asked for. An image returned by
  an MCP tool and a browser screenshot both become images inside io-harness, but
  through private plumbing and with no event of any kind — there is no media
  variant among its fifty-one — so nothing reaches this program to draw.
• Live indicators for MCP servers, language servers and the browser. All
  three are fields of a task contract supplied by the caller, and no io-harness
  session entry point takes one, so those events cannot fire in a session at all.
  They already work in io exec, whose contract carries them, and --json
  already emits them. Moved to 0.10.0, which waits on the same change.

Install

macOS and Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/initorigin/io-cli/main/install.sh | sh

Windows, in PowerShell:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/initorigin/io-cli/main/install.ps1 | iex

Both scripts verify the artifact against SHA256SUMS before unpacking
it and install into a per-user directory with no administrator rights.
The checksum defends against a truncated download and a tampered asset;
curl | sh is a trust-the-publisher model regardless.