Ari v0.2.9

Ari 0.2.9 is the first build that lets an agent running inside Ari spawn and coordinate other Ari sessions. That orchestration surface is early beta: it is on, it is usable, and it will change. Treat it as something to try, not something to bet a workflow on yet.

Thanks to @j35dev for the work in this release.

Agent-native orchestration (early beta)

An agent inside Ari can now create, prompt, inspect, wait on, integrate, stop, and destroy child Ari sessions. Ari stays the environment; the parent model chooses the strategy. (#162)

• Children are real sessions. They show up in the sidebar as a nested tree under the parent, with a branch mark on orchestrator rows. Activity for live children docks as a drop-up on the composer rather than filling the transcript.
• Isolated worktrees by default. Coding children start from a snapshot of the parent's workspace (staged, unstaged, and non-ignored untracked files) without touching the real index or HEAD. Shared-workspace children require an explicit opt-in and policy allowance.
• Bundled ari CLI + skill. The desktop app injects a private ari onto each provider process PATH. No global PATH or agent config is modified. ari skill install is optional and only copies the skill into that agent's user config.
• Explicit integration. Nothing is auto-merged, committed, or pushed. session diff records a snapshot; session integrate three-way-merges that snapshot into the parent working tree and leaves conflicts untouched.
• Subtree lifecycle. Deleting a parent (UI or ari session destroy) stops live turns and removes the whole tree. session stop keeps a child for follow-up; destroy removes it.
• Policy and approvals. Delegation, child count, depth, recursive spawn, and shared-workspace opt-in are permission settings. The first request per root goes through the existing approval card. A child cannot gain more permission than its parent.

Early beta caveats. Expect rough edges around provider coverage, wait/timeouts, conflict handling, and how much of this each CLI actually uses without a skill install. Credentials rotate when the app restarts. This is an application authorization boundary, not an OS sandbox — tokens must not be printed or pasted into prompts.

Everyday use

• Live provider usage pill. The header shows remaining allowance for the current session (5-hour window first, weekly as fallback) and expands to a list of installed providers with reset times. Codex and Grok report live limits; Claude currently surfaces as unavailable because its adapter only returns token/cost totals. Failed refreshes keep the last reading and mark it stale. (#153)
• Drag to reorder projects. Project groups in the sidebar can be dragged by their header, or moved with Move up / Move down in the context menu. The stored order survives restarts and drives Mod+1..9 / Ctrl+Tab. Unfiled stays a trailing, non-draggable group. (#155)
• Ari Dev is a separate app. pnpm dev now runs as Ari Dev with its own profile (%APPDATA%\Ari Dev on Windows, OS equivalent elsewhere), so it can sit next to an installed Ari. Packaged installs are unchanged. Two unpackaged processes still collapse to one window. (#154)
• Composer drafts survive session switches. Unsent prompt text is keyed per session. Switching away and back restores it; send and stash still clear it. (#158)
• Steered follow-ups stay in the transcript. A prompt sent while a turn is running used to vanish on providers that can steer mid-turn (Claude stdin, ACP). It is now journaled as a normal user message. Providers without steering still show the queued chip. (#159)
• Dead slash-command popup removed from the composer. (#161)

Docs and repo

• Clone URLs, release links, and README badges now point at j35dev/Ari. (#156)
• Human-facing CONTRIBUTING.md, plus bug / feature / good-first-issue templates. (#157)
• Internal planning docs are no longer in the public tree. (#160)

Downloads

Installers for Windows, macOS (universal), and Linux are attached below.

Platform	File
Windows	Ari-Setup-0.2.9.exe
macOS	Ari-0.2.9-universal.dmg (zip also attached for auto-update)
Linux	Ari-0.2.9.AppImage, Ari-0.2.9.deb

Full changelog: v0.2.8...v0.2.9