v12.5.6 - An Answer You Can Actually Give

Being asked a question is no use if the form has nowhere to put your answer. Skales could ask you four things and accept none of them, and the setup screen for browsing the web reported itself ready on the same page that said it was not. Both were the same kind of fault: something reported a state instead of checking it.

Added

• Skales can speak on your phone in a voice from this Mac. This computer has dozens of voices installed, the premium ones included, and they cost nothing and never leave your own two devices. The paired app (2.5.6 and newer) offers them under Voice: pick one from the list this machine reports and it speaks for the phone over the pairing connection. Nothing is played on this computer's speakers - the phone asked for the audio, not for the room to hear it - and if this machine goes away mid-sentence the phone falls back to its own voice rather than going quiet. The same is available locally at /api/tts/say. A computer that is not a Mac says so instead of reporting an empty list of voices.

• The Organization scene shows you who is stuck. The office under a running team was decoration: wood-grained desks, a steaming mug, a bouncing ball you could kick. With six agents working, none of it told you which one had stalled without reading six labels. It has been redrawn around that one job. Colour now means state and nothing else - the furniture is near-monochrome and a pool of light on the floor under each desk carries the agent's status, readable across the whole panel before a single word is. The monitor is the status lamp, breathing while there is work and dim while there is not; the ring around an agent grows when the state changes instead of blinking, so a glance mid-change still reads correctly; and the chip under each desk shows the tool actually running rather than the word "Working". The mug, the bookshelf, the clock and the kickable ball are gone with it.

• Instructions you write once, followed everywhere. Telling Skales how you want it to work - answer in German, keep it short, never open with a compliment - lasted exactly one conversation, and the next chat started ignorant again. Code mode could read a project's own CLAUDE.md, but only with a folder bound, and that file is about a project rather than about you. Settings, under Chat & Code, now has a box for standing instructions. What you put in it travels with every conversation, with tasks and schedules that run while you are away, and with custom agents you built yourself. Two places leave it out deliberately: an isolated agent, which carries nothing of yours by design, and the internal calls Skales makes to itself, whose answers are read by the app rather than by you. A project's own CLAUDE.md is the more specific instruction and still wins for that project. The box is not the only way in. It is backed by a plain SKALES.md file in your data dir, the path is printed under the box, and editing it in a text editor is the same edit: the box re-reads the file whenever you come back to the window. If it changed on disk while you had unsaved text here, it says so and refuses to save over it, so the two ways of editing cannot quietly eat each other's work.

• Right-click a key field and paste into it. A password field in Settings gets its own menu - copy the value while it stays masked, reveal it, remove it - and the app suppresses the ordinary Cut/Paste one so the two do not draw on top of each other. Between the two, nothing offered to put a key in: the menu opened, showed three things you could do to a key you already had, and none of them helped when the key was sitting on your clipboard. Paste is in that menu now. It respects a selection, so pasting over a highlighted key replaces it, and the keyboard shortcut keeps working as it always did.

Fixed

• A page you visit cannot reach the Skales API on your own machine. The local server is reachable from any page open in your browser, and that was being closed one route at a time: the same-origin check sat on 2 of 225 routes. There is one shared check now, in front of every /api request, and it refuses exactly one thing - a caller that CLAIMS an origin which is neither this server nor your own machine, which is the shape a page on another site makes when it fetches your local port. Everything that is not a browser is untouched: the messaging bots, the relay, the CLI, the phone over your LAN and the app talking to itself all keep working, and each of them has a test. The image context menu had the same hole in miniature and no longer opens a menu for a message no frame on the page sent.

• Discover stops passing its own template off as your model's work. Composing a post gave the model 45 seconds, then quietly substituted a local phrase bank and returned it with no mark on it. With auto-post on, that template was published under your name as if your agent had written it. The ceiling is 180 seconds now - measured: at 45 seconds ten live models were being called dead, and at 180 seconds seven of them answered - the composer no longer gives up before the server does, a fallback draft says that it is one, and auto-post holds for it. Cloud versus local was also decided by a list of five provider names, so every provider added since counted as running on your own computer; the endpoint decides now.

• The in-app guide is the guide the assistant reads. The served copy of the guide, which is what fetch_skales_docs answers from, was five releases behind the source one while both showed the current version in their header. They are copied on every version stamp now, and the guide covers 12.5.1 through 12.5.6.

• Muting notifications is now actually silent. The switch promises no pings on any channel while everything still lands on the Notifications page, and those two halves were the leak. A notification is written to that page first and only then silenced, and the toast that pops up in the corner was being built from the page's own records - so muting stopped the browser notification and the messengers, and a toast and a sound came through anyway. In practice that meant a Briefing nudge and a Discover mention still interrupted you. The toast is a channel like the others now and falls silent with them. One exception stays, the same one the other channels make: a request that is waiting on your answer still reaches you, because silencing that would leave work stalled with nothing to show for it. What was silenced is not saved up either - unmuting does not empty the quiet period onto your screen; it is all on the Notifications page, where it always was.

• A mention in the Discover feed stopped outranking your own settings. It was filed at the urgency reserved for things that block work until you answer, which let it through Mute, through quiet hours, and past the limit you can set on how often Discover may ping - while still using up that limit's daily slot, so a mention could silence the normal feed ping. It is filed as ordinary now and obeys all three.

• A question with choices no longer stops at the choices. When Skales asked you something and offered buttons to answer it, the buttons were all there was. A question like "What is your name and what do you do?" came with four roles to pick from and no way to type a name, so the one answer being asked for could not be given - the card sat there, nothing moved, and the run looked like it had died. Every set of choices now ends with one you can write into yourself. The rest of the card caught up too: the short label a question carries is shown, and the line of explanation that comes with each choice - the part that tells you what picking it actually means - is shown under it instead of being dropped on the way to the screen. Questions asked before this release still open and still work.

• Browser Control says whether it can browse, not whether it once could. The setup screen read a note written the last time an install had gone well, and nothing ever revised it. So the panel could sit there marked ready while the same panel, a few lines further down, refused to open a window and said the browser was missing - and it was: the app had moved on to a newer browser build that had never been fetched. The screen now asks the question it was claiming to answer, every time you open it: would opening a page work right now, with the browser you have chosen. If it would not, it says which part is missing and offers the button that fixes it, instead of hiding that button because it believed everything was fine.

• A failure to launch is no longer reported as a failure to install. Any problem that so much as mentioned the browser engine was rewritten into "not installed", including the engine's own complaint that it could not find the browser it wanted. The advice attached to it sent you to the screen you were already looking at, to press a button that screen was hiding. Each of those is now named for what it is, and the advice names something you can do - fetch the browser, or switch to the one already on your machine.

• Install Chromium can install Chromium. The button had two ways to do nothing. With "Use full Chromium" turned on it took a shortcut meant for people using their own Chrome, reported success and downloaded nothing. And in the packaged app the downloader itself had not been shipped: the build keeps the parts of a library it can see being used, and the piece that fetches a browser is started in a way that keeps it out of sight, so the one build that needs the button most was the one where it failed. Both are fixed, and the button now confirms the result against a real launch rather than against its own exit code.

• A privacy note stopped introducing itself twice. The desktop screenshot notice began "Privacy: Privacy:", because the screen put a heading in front of a sentence that already carried its own - in whichever language you read it in. The heading the translation uses is now the only one shown.

• The Nvidia model list is the models that answer. Every entry was called once and checked: of the 118 the catalogue lists, 44 reply to an actual message. Three of the six that shipped had been retired - including the one labelled "(Best)", which is the first thing a new user reaches for, so their first message failed and read like the provider was down. The list is now the verified ones, fastest first, and two things it taught are carried with it: a model that appears in a catalogue is not the same as a model you can call, and a slow first token is not a dead model.

• A retired model is reported as a model problem, not a setup problem. Nvidia answers a request for a withdrawn model with the words "404 page not found" - no code, no JSON - and that was surfaced as though the connection or the key were wrong, sending you to check settings that were fine.

• The curated model picks are the ones you actually see. The list was filed under one name for the provider and looked up under another, so the app decided there was no curation and showed the first few hardcoded entries instead. Refreshing against 118 live models changed nothing on screen.

• An empty "Allowed tools" field means every tool, not none. Leaving the box blank on a custom agent saved an empty list, and an empty list is a complete answer: this agent may use nothing. So the one thing you do when you don't know the tool names gave the agent no tools at all, and it failed by politely explaining it had no capabilities. Blank now means what a person means by it. The field also stopped requiring you to know the answer in advance: it filters all 184 tools by name and description, shows what you picked as chips, and says so when a name matches nothing.

• An isolated agent cannot reach the two tools that were a shell in disguise. Running commands is denied to an isolated agent on purpose. Two other tools each took an optional command and passed it straight through without a list of what is allowed, which made either of them a full shell by another name. They are denied now and gone from that agent's catalogue. No isolated agent could reach them in practice, because both need a bound code folder - an accident of plumbing rather than a decision, and it would have stopped being true the moment one got a folder.

• Video rendering works on Linux. Every Linux build shipped a copy of the video encoder built for macOS, and it was the first one the app found, so rendering a Studio video or a Flow motion died at the moment it started the encoder. The app now refuses a binary that cannot run on the machine it is on - on any platform, not just macOS - and looks in the place the correct Linux build actually ships, falling back to one installed on the system and, failing that, saying plainly that it found none.