v2.0.0

Kent 2.0.0

Kent 2.0.0 is the first release under the project's new name: Builder is now Kent. Alongside the rename, this release adds a refreshed brand color scheme, customizable system prompts, and a broad round of interactive-mode (TUI), session, shell-output, and background-service improvements.

This is a major version because the rename changes the binary name, the configuration environment variables, and the on-disk data location. Migration is a one-time, manual step (see Compatibility Notes).

Highlights

Builder is now Kent

The CLI, server, background service, prompts, and docs are rebranded to Kent. The binary is kent, the persistence root moves from ~/.builder to ~/.kent, and BUILDER_* environment variables are now KENT_*. Your existing sessions, projects, and workspace state carry over through the one-time migration below.

Refreshed color scheme

Kent ships a new brand color palette, applied consistently across the TUI and the documentation site and driven by semantic tokens (primary, secondary, success, warning, error) instead of ad-hoc colors:

• Primary #3185fc, Secondary #f96824, Success #12ba85, Warning #ffe74c, Error #dc2e3c, on a #12100e dark background.
• The docs site now uses the same semantic palette tokens, so status colors and light/dark themes stay consistent with the app.
• The startup banner renders the wordmark with a diagonal primary→secondary gradient.
• Truecolor output is matched to terminal channel truncation, so the palette renders correctly across terminals.

Customizable system prompts

The default system prompt is now split into composable sections — personality, autonomy, quality, formatting, and delegation — so custom prompt templates can override individual sections instead of replacing the whole prompt.

Interactive mode (TUI)

• The TUI stays responsive under heavy runtime load. Rendering no longer performs I/O or heavy work on the main thread, runtime/status reads are cache-only, and the TUI never refetches the full transcript while streaming or while /ps is open. The cursor stays smooth no matter how many background shells, sessions, or streaming agents are active (closes #317).
• The activity stream stays alive after a reconnect, recovering missed session activity instead of going stale.
• Ongoing-mode scrollback is repaired: streamed assistant output finalizes exactly once, without duplicated or stale lines.
• Terminal resize is handled safely mid-stream.
• /supervisor shows the full suggestion text in ongoing mode when verbose reviewer output is enabled.
• /goal can be set or overwritten after a run has completed, with clearer guidance when you overwrite an existing goal.
• Fixed a crash when pasting or reading certain images. view_image now down-converts large images to WebP when it reduces payload size, raises the attachment cap to 800 KiB, and rejects animated GIF/WebP.

Keep long jobs running

• Kent prevents the system from sleeping while agents are actively running, on macOS, Linux, and Windows, so long jobs don't stall when your machine idles. Sleep-prevention errors are surfaced to the transcript and status line instead of failing silently.
  The default option keeps your device from sleeping only when agents are running (active). You can change this in config.toml to always keep your device awake while the kent server is running, or never.

prevent_sleep = "active" # always | active | off

• A new /questions on|off slash command toggles the ask_question tool per session. State defaults to on, survives compaction, and resets on restart; This is intended to use with /goal or during long sessions when you want to prevent a chatty model from asking you things, as an innocent question can stall a /goal run for hours.

Reliability

• Compaction recovers from context-window overflows instead of failing the session by trimming tool outputs dynamically.
• Idle session runtimes are released to free memory, while active work is preserved across client disconnects (#315).
• Better provider prompt-cache reuse: subagent context is isolated, conversation history is kept provider-ready, and token-count cache keys are hashed — improving cache hit rates and lowering latency and cost.
• The background service restarts reliably on macOS (launchd reload), including recovery when an installed service is unloaded but a healthy listener still owns the endpoint.
• Shell output is steadier: async output is drained on completion, and raw or truncated output is now flagged rather than passed through silently.

Providers & auth

• Non-default providers now respect no-auth mode and an explicit base URL, fixing problems with the usage of local LLMs or custom providers.
• OAuth account email is populated from the token's JWT claims.

Compatibility Notes

This release renames Builder to Kent. Migration is manual and one-time:

1. Stop all Builder activity: interactive sessions, builder serve, and builder service stop if you run the background service.
2. Move and rebase your data: builder migrate (available on the builder 2.0 release)
3. Install Kent: brew install respawn-llc/homebrew-tap/kent
4. Remove the old formula: brew uninstall builder-cli

• Environment variables: rename BUILDER_* to KENT_*.
• Data location: the persistence root moves from ~/.builder to ~/.kent; builder migrate performs the move and rebase. Installers detect a legacy ~/.builder and print the concrete, platform-correct migration commands.
• Custom prompts and workspace skills are carried across by the migration;
• The standalone builder build is migration-only - it does not start a server or run agents. It exists solely to run builder migrate.