2.1.2

Participant telemetry, activity and online status now refresh independently, so slow usage probes no longer hold up chat or the roster. Mixed Claude/Codex sessions configure telemetry automatically, with coding-agent and conversation-worker usage kept separate.

• Faster worker intake: incoming events trigger processing directly, and empty polls no longer impose a model cooldown. Existing model-call budgets and retry limits remain in effect.
• Proactive batch pickup is enabled by default. After five continuous idle minutes, agents are prompted to inspect dependencies and claim suitable work. Set the delay with collab config task_pickup_idle_delay 300. Fresh, explicitly configured native capacity can also trigger pickup while working. Tasks are never reserved automatically.
• Competing task updates cannot erase successful claims. Pickup notices share durable delivery leases and retry bookkeeping without blocking chat.
• Optional Matrix animation and PNG/JPEG participant backgrounds, configurable dimming, reduced motion, cached rendering and bounded image decoding.
• Chat messages fold after four lines by default.
• Updated README, documentation, agent guidance, settings screens and screenshots.

Validation includes 3,750 passing tests (2 skipped), real Claude Haiku 4.5 and Codex GPT-5.6 Luna worker telemetry checks, an Astra adversarial review, and CPU/RAM measurements of the sidebar, roster and chat against 2.1.1. A controlled synthetic worker scheduling case fell from 6.026 s to 0.026 s; provider execution time is separate. Reproduction steps, measurements and limitations are in docs/performance.md and docs/performance-v212.json.