Release v0.90.0

[wladimiiir]

Highlights

📁 File Editor Modal Overhaul: File Tree Sidebar, Tab Context Menus & State Persistence

Navigating and editing project files without leaving your active task just got significantly easier. The workspace file editor modal now features an integrated file tree sidebar, allowing you to browse, expand folders, and open files directly inside the editor view. We have also added tab context menus (Close Others, Close to the Right, Close All) for faster tab hygiene, alongside full editor state persistence - your open tabs, active tab, and unsaved editor content stay intact even if you close and reopen the modal or navigate between views.

⚙️ Dedicated Model Overrides for Compaction & Handoff

You can now configure separate model overrides for conversation compaction and agent handoffs in Context Management settings. High-end reasoning models are ideal for complex coding prompts, but using them for compaction summaries can consume unnecessary tokens and risk hitting rate limits. With this update, you can route background summarization and compaction workloads to faster, cost-effective models (such as Claude 3.5 Haiku, Gemini 2.0 Flash, or GPT-4o-mini) while keeping your primary frontier model focused on code generation. Learn more in the Handoff & Compaction documentation.

🎯 Editable Model Modalities & Capability-Aware Attachment Filtering

Different models excel with different inputs, and the Model Library now makes this explicit and configurable. You can view and edit supported input and output modalities (text, image, audio, video, PDF) for any provider or model. AiderDesk uses these capabilities to automatically filter incompatible file attachments before sending requests to models that cannot process them, preventing frustrating API errors. For custom or unknown model identifiers, attachments are preserved as-is so new endpoints and experimental multimodal workflows continue to work smoothly. Check out the Providers documentation for details.

🤖 Enhanced Task Tools: Prepared Tasks, Execution & Autonomy Controls

Agent task orchestration receives major improvements with expanded controls for Task tools:

• Prepared Tasks: Agents can prepare tasks with initial prompts and start or resume them later without restarting conversations.
• Execution Controls: Support for explicit execution modes (create_only, wait_for_finish, run_in_background).
• Autonomy Settings: Fine-grained autonomy levels (manual, guided, autonomous) can now be passed directly to task executions.
• Readable Tracking: Tool messages in the chat interface now display actual task names rather than raw identifiers, making multi-task workflows much easier to follow.

See the Task Tools documentation for more information.

🔌 Extension Ecosystem: Background Generation, Worktree Hooks & Custom Catalogs

This release introduces substantial capabilities for extension developers:

• Background Context Generation: Extensions can now trigger background text generation and streaming (generateText, streamText) directly within task context.
• Worktree Lifecycle Hooks: New onWorktreeCreated and onWorktreeMerged hooks allow extensions to run project-specific automation, custom environment setups, or branch synchronization scripts when switching working modes.
• Custom Catalogs & Independent Favorites: Extension model selector components can now provide custom model catalogs and maintain their own favorite selections independently from global model settings.
• Reliable Recovery: Fixed a bug where onPromptFinished was missed during agent resume and restart recovery.

Explore the updated Extension API Reference to start building with these new APIs.

Other Changes

• Security & Runtimes:
  • Updated Electron, Node.js, and uv runtimes for upstream security vulnerabilities.
  • Added automatic Python certificate bundle updates and startup warnings for unpatched Node.js versions.
  • Prevented potential OS command injection in extension repository clone paths.
• Provider & Model Configuration: Added required streaming settings for providers and individual models, allowing you to enforce streaming on models that mandate it.
• Mobile & Remote Reconnects: Fixed duplicate prompt execution caused by mobile clients replaying requests after reconnecting to the server.
• Chat UI: Improved grouping and spacing of tool-only messages in Compact message view for a cleaner conversation flow.
• Attachments: Preserved detected MIME types in context image attachments instead of falling back to generic image types, preventing request failures on less common formats.

🧩 Extensions

• Sound Notification: Made audio playback non-blocking with format-aware Linux player fallbacks (paplay, aplay, pw-play) and an execution watchdog to prevent notification hangs.

💡 We'd love to hear your thoughts! Your feedback helps us improve AiderDesk - feel free to share any suggestions or issues. Happy coding! 🚀

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This discussion was created from the release 0.90.0.