PiClaw v2.6.6 — The Long Goodbye

PiClaw v2.6.6 — "The Long Goodbye"

Re-release notice: v2.6.6 has been retagged to d9031eddf7eb876772c460216c06d6f63f74118a. This rebuild fixes Linux .run installers so bundled pi CLI entrypoints run through the bundled Bun runtime instead of a #!/usr/bin/env node shim. Earlier v2.6.6 .run artifacts can fail with env: node: No such file or directory; discard them and use the regenerated assets attached to this release.

A small web/session, Dream, and viewer-safety patch about saying goodbye to archived branches properly, not half-deleting them, not leaving stale picker entries behind, and not letting VNC, Dream daily notes, provider metadata, or portable installer shims wander around unsupervised with sharp objects.

Features

• VNC clipboard sending now has bounded controls, because remote clipboard plumbing should not become an unmetered paste cannon just because someone found the button.
• Womprat viewer safety fixes were ported into the VNC path, tightening remote display handling around the sort of edge cases protocols develop after years of being “simple”.

Fixes

• Linux .run bundles now launch the bundled Pi CLI with Bun, fixing portable installs that failed when the target host lacked a system node binary. Portable means portable, apparently; bold concept.
• Dream reseeding now handles stale daily notes more reliably, improves cue coverage across session trees, applies model overrides to manual runs, and uses the runtime timezone for day boundaries instead of assuming time is a flat circle with UTC stickers on it.
• Provider disconnect errors in the web UI are sanitised before display, because authentication and provider internals do not need to do interpretive dance in front of users.
• Archived-session pruning from the session popup now waits for confirmed prune handling before the UI dismisses itself, because disappearing the dialog before the operation finishes is not “responsive”, it is just evasive.
• Archived session delete controls stay visible where they are actually needed, and the picker refreshes after deletion so removed sessions stop haunting the list like bureaucratic ghosts.
• Archived sessions can now be purged directly from the picker, tightening the cleanup path and reducing the number of tiny rituals required to remove old branches.
• The short-lived archived-session download path was removed from the picker flow, because turning every cleanup menu into a Swiss Army knife is how UI becomes cutlery with a login screen.
• GitHub Copilot Opus compaction no longer gets reasoning enabled by accident, and compaction reasoning is now gated on explicit thinking levels rather than vibes, weather, or whichever provider setting happened to wander past.
• Markdown live preview now renders inline code inside link labels properly, because a link label containing code should not have to choose between being clickable and being legible.

Under the hood

• Earendil packages were bumped to 0.79.3, carrying the inherited Codex/GPT-5 context-window metadata safety fix so model limits are less likely to be discovered by impact testing.
• The portable Linux run-bundle launcher now executes pi through the bundled Bun runtime, matching the bundled piclaw launcher path instead of assuming /usr/bin/env node exists on the target host.
• Dream tests and optional scheduler fixtures were aligned with partial notes and the new stale-note handling.
• The message-deletion E2E shard now targets the exact message it creates, so old timeline leftovers stop masquerading as a product regression.
• Session picker, compose-box, branch lifecycle, archived-branch database, and branch-control tests were updated around the prune/delete flow.
• Smart-compaction safety tests now cover explicit reasoning-level gating so compaction does not quietly become a premium-token bonfire.
• VNC pane, input, and remote-display regression coverage were expanded around the viewer safety and clipboard changes.
• Classic and visual web assets were rebuilt for the session cleanup, VNC, Dream, provider, installer, and editor preview changes.

Known issues

• Archived-session cleanup is still necessarily destructive; the UI now waits and refreshes more honestly, but it cannot make deleting history philosophically cheerful.
• Provider reasoning semantics remain provider semantics, which is to say a contract written on fog but now at least checked before use.
• VNC remains VNC: a protocol apparently designed to remind everyone that rectangles and clipboards can both be threat models.

Upgrade

• Upgrade normally; no migration step is required.
• If you downloaded a previous v2.6.6 Linux .run installer, discard it and download the regenerated artifact from this release.
• If archived sessions now leave the picker when deleted instead of lingering like a bad decision with a timestamp, that is intentional.