v0.2.0 — Flowkite

First release under the name Flowkite. The previous one (v0.1.13) predates the rename and is missing everything below — if you installed from it, replace it with this build.

Flowkite is still 100% free and local: no account, no backend, no telemetry you can't turn off. The only cost is your own LLM provider bill.

Control and safety

• Approval modes. Approval is now one choice in the composer instead of two settings buried in Options. manual gates every page-touching action including navigation, planner gates the plan (previous behaviour), auto gates nothing — including before money and credentials, so switching it on takes an acknowledgement that names exactly what it turns off. Changing the mode pushes into a task that is already running rather than only saving to storage.
• Human handoff. The agent can park itself with ask_user and hand the tab back to you for a login or a captcha. Your credentials go straight into the page and never through the model.
• Privacy dashboard. A new Options pane answers "what left this machine?" from local records only: token totals per model, every host the agent itself visited, and every webhook delivery. Capped, never uploaded, one-click clearable. Your own browsing is never logged — only the agent's navigation.
• No more numbered boxes on your page. The highlight overlay is gone by default; it is still drawn while vision is on, because the model grounds its indices on it, and now only for as long as the capture instead of the whole model round-trip.

Cost and time

• Budget brake. Enter your own per-model USD prices (nothing is shipped or assumed) and a per-task cap. The task pauses mid-run with a continue/stop card. Unpriced models count as unknown, never as zero.
• Scheduled tasks. Daily unattended runs in their own background tab. Scheduling pre-approves the plan, sensitive actions auto-decline, and results land in history with a notification.
• A cheaper, more correct step. The page is parsed once per step instead of three to seven times — which also fixes a real bug, since every re-parse renumbered the elements and the index the model picked could resolve to a different one. History trimming, which was written but never actually called, now runs. Retries are three attempts with backoff in one place, instead of two stacked layers that could have fired 21 requests for one rate-limited step.

New abilities

• Vision escalation. When a step fails, the next state read attaches a numbered screenshot even with vision off, so the model can re-ground instead of retrying against the same blind description. Bounded by the failure budget.
• Two-way webhook. Task outcomes POST to one URL you choose (https anywhere, plain http only on localhost). The response may carry {"followUp": "next task"} and Flowkite runs it unattended — capped at three chained follow-ups, opt-in, off by default.
• Task templates. A pinned prompt with {slots}; Tab walks the slots and send is held until none are left. Fresh installs get two examples.
• "Ask Flowkite" context menu on any page or selection, opening the side panel with the composer pre-filled.
• extract_content returns to you, capped and injection-wrapped, with pipe tables rendered as real tables and a Copy CSV button.
• One task, one answer. A live status line that overwrites in place, one persisted result, and the step trail one click beneath it — instead of four separate bubbles. The line is a live region, so screen readers still get the progress.
• Tab grouping and a completion chime. Tabs the agent opens are collected into one labelled Chrome tab group, so an automated tab is obvious among your own. The chime rises on success and falls on anything that did not finish, well under system alert volume.

Fixes

• API keys are no longer written to logs.
• Ollama's CORS help link and 403 message point at docs.ollama.com/faq — the old URL 404s.
• The quick start link and the X link point at the real destinations.
• A leak in the DOM parser that added two window listeners per highlighted element, per parse, unbounded.

Install

Not on the Chrome Web Store yet.

1. Download flowkite-0.2.0.zip below and unzip it.
2. Open chrome://extensions/ and turn on Developer mode.
3. Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder.

Chrome or Edge. Bring an API key for OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, or point it at a local Ollama.