v0.8.8

What's new

🎛️ Home becomes a command center. A Deck now sits above your list with two bays: Needs you (amber — questions, permission requests, and code sessions waiting on approval, aggregated from every runtime) and Underway, whose strips show what each delegated thread is doing right now. Pin any thread to a numbered slot and jump straight back with 1–9, cycle the needs-you queue with J, snooze with H (four hours or until the thread moves, whichever comes first), or dismiss a claim entirely — dismissed threads only come back if the work actually moves again. The whole band collapses to nothing when things are quiet. Skipper docks in the header and takes the watch: idle when quiet, rowing while work is underway, an amber badge when something needs you. The old Overview tab is retired.

🗣️ Command Center — a standing channel for dispatch. Click Skipper on Home to start a voice call bound to one persistent Command Center session. It's a dispatcher, not a doer: "add X" captures a to-do, "have rowboat do X" delegates it — one item per independent piece, so they run as parallel threads — and "what needs me?" reads the same live registry the Deck renders, so a spoken sitrep comes from ground truth. Confirmations are terse and voice-first: "Added." / "Dispatched."

💻 Set your repo once, then just say what you want. Settings → Code gains a default repo (with a single registered project, it's the default automatically), and cwd is no longer required — the first coding turn of any chat, typed or spoken or dispatched from a to-do, adopts the session into an isolated worktree and starts tracking it in the Code section. No "which repo?", no "which agent?" Home's composer grows a Code lane for aiming a to-do at a project. When a coding turn settles you get git's own accounting as a receipt — "ready for review — +42 −18 across 5 files" — and the agent reports ready, never done: merging stays your call. Every door on Home into a code thread now opens the Code section with its diffs, not just the bare conversation.

📊 Build decks from chat. Ask for a presentation and Rowboat writes a real .pptx — create, add, edit, restyle, reorder, and review slides, across nine themes including a dark Midnight. It asks before it builds (purpose, audience, length, and the facts the deck depends on) through the new question cards, and it won't invent numbers or quotes: anything it wasn't given comes back as a bracketed placeholder for you to fill. Editing an open deck diffs paragraph by paragraph, so formatting you applied by hand survives. The assistant knows which deck you have open, so "fix slide 2" targets it instead of creating a new file, and writes are transactional — a stale editor can't silently clobber the assistant's work, or vice versa. Blank decks are one click from the workspace Add menu.

❓ The assistant can ask you a real question. When it needs a decision it shows a question card instead of a paragraph — lettered A/B/C/D options, multi-select for pick-all-that-apply, an always-present "Other (type your answer)" row, full keyboard control, and a Skip that tells it to use its own judgment rather than asking again. Batched questions come one at a time with a "1 of N" counter.

✍️ Ghostwriter: words at your cursor. Point at an email, hold ⇧ then right ⌘, and speak — the text lands where your cursor is, in whatever app you're in. Speak content and it types your words verbatim (fixing fillers and punctuation only); ask it to write something and it composes. It pastes and stops — never Enter, never Send. If the paste can't go through, the payload is left on your clipboard, one ⌘V away, and the reply hands it back as a copyable block. The words are never lost. macOS in this release.

🔊 Voice becomes a capability, not just a mode. Agents and mini apps can speak and listen with no new keys: new text-to-speech and transcribe-audio builtins (per-speaker voices, audio lands in your workspace) plus a voice capability for Rowboat Apps. Verified end to end with a headless agent producing a complete multi-voice podcast episode.

🔑 Code Mode knows who's signed in. Sign-in status now comes from asking the provisioned engine (claude auth status / codex login status) instead of grepping for credential files — so Keychain-only installs, CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR, and managed enterprise auth stop reporting "not signed in." Each agent row is an account card with the real email, plan badge, and a live status dot. Engines bumped along with it: claude-agent-sdk 0.3.232, codex 0.147.0.

Also in this release

• Gmail sync is materially more reliable — throttled requests retry once honoring Retry-After, reconnecting after a disconnect backfills the whole inbox again, and old threads with fresh replies (which Gmail's creation-date ordering hides) are finally caught; the email view also keeps streaming live updates through a disconnect instead of needing a restart
• The inbox list no longer lurches upward while you scroll it
• Everyone on an open email thread who has a People note shows as a pill under the summary — click through to their note
• The screen pointer is an option, not an obligation: the assistant points to answer a "where / which one" question, not out of habit, and only when it can clearly see the target in the latest frame — a wrong pointer is worse than none
• One hover companion, one behavior: the old Spotlight-style ask bar is gone, so ⌥⇧Space no longer flashes the wrong surface, goes dead after the first summon, or leaves you talking to a window that never arrives
• Fixed the crash behind all three 0.8.7 crash reports — a failure inside the global keyboard hook could take the whole main process down
• Clicking a notification focuses the app window instead of force-showing the hidden companion at stale bounds
• Billing errors sitting in an old transcript no longer replay as live upgrade popups on every launch
• Two repos that share a folder name are distinguishable everywhere — labels carry a compact parent path (…/rowboat/apps/x)
• Home restyled in the Notion idiom: borderless rows, separation by hover background, and a quieter type ladder