v12.7.0 - Everybody's AI

Skales started as a platform for everyone: set up in minutes, no prior knowledge, grandma approved. Over the past two months Skales has grown fast - and week by week it became more and more a power user's tool. Both are true, and both belong to Skales. But one promise was at stake: the lightness.

So with this release we rethought setup, add-ons and settings. On first start you choose what you want Skales to do for you - and that is exactly what you get: a sidebar that only shows what you use, settings that in Standard show only what belongs to your choice. And for everyone who wants everything: Advanced still shows every screw, same as always.

Every single piece of feedback was read. We matched the roadmap against your feedback and pulled forward what helps you today. And the promise stands: we will keep helping people who do not know what an API is to run a safe, local agent on their own computer - one that respects your privacy and ties you to no cloud and no provider.

Skales stands for everybody's AI. What it is not yet, it will become. We do not build for a target group - we build for every one of you.

Fixed

• A local model is allowed to think before it answers. LM Studio, llama.cpp and anything else on your own machine sends nothing at all while it reads your prompt, and on slower hardware that quiet stretch runs for minutes. Skales measured it with the same thirty-second stopwatch it uses for a cloud stream, declared the connection dead, silently sent the whole request a second time (so the machine evaluated the same prompt twice), and then reported that the provider had stopped responding. Local and custom endpoints now get a generous window for the wait before the first token, and the ordinary short window from the first token onward, so a socket that really dies mid-answer is still caught. The Request Timeout slider in Settings raises that first window too; until now it only ever governed the wait for the connection itself, which is why turning it up changed nothing. Nothing about cloud streaming changed.

• A local runtime is no longer asked to do the work twice. A stalled stream used to be retried by sending the identical request again. Against a cloud endpoint that is a cheap second try; against your own machine it throws away the prompt evaluation already done and starts it over, so the retry is slower than the attempt it replaced. Local endpoints now report what happened instead.

• An interrupted answer says it was interrupted. When a provider's connection closes mid-generation without saying why, Skales used to record that as a normal finish. At the end of a chain of tool calls the result was a cut-off turn presented as a completed one, sometimes with nothing but a cheerful closing line. A dropped connection is now named as one: an answer that was already partly written is continued, an empty one is reported and retried rather than accepted, and the same is true on the Anthropic and Gemini paths, in the chat, and in the Telegram and WhatsApp loops.

• A model that thinks slowly can now say so. Skales decides how long a model may stay silent by reading its name, which works until a model that thinks for minutes is called something that mentions none of it. An LLM profile can now declare it outright, so the next model of that kind is a profile update rather than an app release. Nemotron is declared in the built-in profiles.

• A blocked free model no longer sends you looking for a replacement. When a provider answers that no endpoint matches your data policy, Skales used to say the model had most likely been retired or renamed. The model is there; your account's privacy settings exclude every endpoint that could serve it, which is what usually happens with free variants. The message now says that, and names the model.

• A 403 from OpenRouter names its three causes. The key being disabled or over its limit, the account privacy settings excluding every endpoint for that model, and the model's provider not accepting requests from your location, in the order worth checking.

• Provider errors are read in your language. Every provider error already carried a translation key and nothing ever looked one up, so all twelve languages saw the English sentence. They no longer do.

• Excel and Word files can be attached. Skales could read a .xlsx or a .docx off disk for a year; the paperclip just did not know the formats existed, so the picker never offered them and a dropped file came back with "cannot be read directly" and instructions to save it into the Workspace by hand. They attach now, in the chat, on the new-chat screen, in a coding session and from the phone, through the same readers the agent already used. A format nothing here can open (.doc, .ppt, .rtf) now says which one it is and what to export it as, instead of getting the same sentence as every unknown binary.

• The conversation says when it stops carrying everything. A long tool-heavy chat was cut to its last sixty entries at a fixed count, silently, while the context meter still showed room: the cut counted messages and the meter counted tokens, so a model started forgetting for reasons nobody could see. The limit now comes from the model's own window, older parts are summarised rather than dropped wherever that is possible, and either way a line appears in the transcript saying what happened. Nothing was ever deleted from disk, and the line says that too. Reopening a long chat shows the same notice in all three places it can happen; before, only one of them mentioned it.

• Windows window buttons stop sitting on the Code window's header. Minimize, Maximize and Close are painted over the page on Windows, and the Code window's header put the model chip and its buttons in exactly that corner. The header now reserves the width the system reports for those buttons, so it stays correct at any display scale. macOS and Linux are unchanged, and the other four windows were checked: two already reserve the strip, and two have no system buttons at all.

• A working agent is no longer stopped for being slow. Sending a second message while Skales was answering the first one cancelled the answer, even when it was three tool calls into finishing the job. Now the count only builds while the turn produces nothing: an agent that is visibly working keeps working however impatient you get, and one that has gone quiet is still stopped after two messages. "stop" still stops it immediately.

• Two people on one Telegram bot are two people. Several Telegram accounts writing to the same bot shared one conversation, and every message was labelled with the name of whoever paired the bot first. Each sender now has their own conversation and their own name, and /clear clears their own rather than everyone's. WhatsApp already worked this way.

• The Tasks page no longer crashes on a task with no name. A to-do created by a model that left the title out was written to disk without one, and every later visit to the Tasks page hit the crash screen instead of the list, over and over, until the file was deleted by hand. A task that arrives without a title is now named after what it says to do, both when it is written and when an existing one is read, so the ones already sitting on your disk stop breaking the page.

• Your own endpoint is no longer capped at 65K. A custom or LM Studio endpoint had no per-model table to look its context window up in, so it fell to a generic 65,536 - and a 200K model was compacted at a third of its window. Three things changed. The endpoint gets to report its own window, and Skales reads it whatever the server calls it. The extra endpoint slots, which had no advanced panel at all, now have the same timeout, retry and limit controls every other provider card has. And a number you type into Override Model Limits now wins over everything else, which it did not: a window reported by the endpoint quietly overruled it. The panel also says which of the three the figure came from, so a setting that took can be seen to have taken.

• The context meter shows what Skales is actually using. It resolved the window without ever looking at your overrides, so raising a limit in Settings changed how much Skales sent and never changed the number on the screen, which is how anyone checks. It reads the same override the call sites read now.

• The empty composer is one line tall again. The box grows with what you type by measuring itself, and the measurement counted the placeholder text as if it were a draft. Any moment the window was narrow - a page transition, a resize - "Ask anything, or describe a goal..." wrapped to six lines and a six-line box was burned in, and it stayed that way, because the height was only re-measured when the draft changed and an empty field has no draft. The thinking dial and the access lock also stood half again too far apart, and now sit as one pair. Both the start screen and the chat.

• The German in the app says "du" everywhere. The WordPress card, the two subscription disclaimers and the whole AIPointer page addressed you as "Sie" while the rest of the app said "du" - a tone that switches mid-app reads as two products stitched together. Thirty-three strings pulled across, each one read first, because German writes the polite address and the ordinary third person with the same words.

• The German in the app is written in German again. The strings the new setup and the Standard view brought with them arrived with every accent stripped, in all seven Latin-script languages: "Was soll Skales koennen?", "Rien n'est definitif", "Skales nen lam duoc nhung gi?". That was the onboarding, the first screen a new user reads. All of them are restored, and the German file is now clean throughout - two hundred more strings had been carrying "aendern" and "Gedaechtnis" since earlier releases. A build check counts the accent-free sentences per language so the next batch cannot arrive the same way.

• Two settings nobody could search for. The safety levels answered to their old names - strict, balanced, permissive - so typing "unrestricted" into the settings search found nothing, and the folders Skales must never touch answered to nothing at all. Both are findable.

• Simple chat stops offering DLNA casting. It has been retired since v11.3.2 and was still being advertised as always available.

• A crash that happens in the window is now recorded like one. Until now only the background processes wrote to the crash log, so a user asked to reproduce a crash and open Settings, Advanced, Diagnostics found nothing there. A render crash now lands in the same place, with its stack, and the crash screen says where to find it. In the chat it also carries the component trail that names what threw, which is the one thing that makes a crash nobody can reproduce fixable.

Added

• GigaChat is a provider now, not a workaround. Sber's models were reachable only by running a proxy of your own, because the custom endpoint field wants a key it can send as-is and GigaChat wants something else twice over: an Authorization Key that has to be traded for a token roughly every half hour, and a root certificate that is in no default certificate store. Skales does the trade itself, keeps the token fresh, and trusts that certificate for GigaChat's requests only - not for this computer, and not for anything else it talks to. Paste the key, pick whether it is a personal, B2B or corporate one, and add the certificate on the card.

• You can put a chat on a shorter leash. Next to the thinking dial in the composer there is now an access control: read-only, read and write, accept edits, or auto. Read-only means Skales can look at anything and change nothing, and it is refused in the place tools actually run, not merely greyed out on screen. It is set per conversation, it survives a reload, it is there on the start screen as well as in a running chat, and read and write, exactly what Skales did before, stays the default. When a folder is bound in Code mode as well, the shorter of the two leashes is the one that counts.

• Skales can show you its own crashes. Settings, Advanced, Diagnostics: what this machine has recorded, on screen and on the clipboard. Crashes, the provider calls that failed this session, recent warnings, and the version and hardware they happened on. It is read from this computer and sent nowhere. An install with nothing recorded says exactly that, rather than implying health.

• The assistant reads its own logs before it explains a failure. Asked why something broke, it used to answer from general knowledge about programs like itself. It now reads the same diagnostics you can see, and says plainly when they show no cause.

• LM Studio is a provider with a name. It always worked through the generic custom endpoint, for anyone who knew the port, the path and that the key field should stay empty. It has its own card now, with the address filled in, no key asked for, a note about the server switch that trips most people up, and the local prompt-evaluation window from the first item on this list applied without anyone configuring it.

• Your own browser can do the browsing. Settings, Browser Control takes the full path to a Chromium-based browser, so automation runs in the profile and the extensions you already have. Leave it empty and nothing changes. A path that is not there stops the launch and says so rather than quietly opening a different browser, and a fork or an old build that refuses to start is named as the untested thing it is.

• The add-on cards stop taking each other's entries. Two cards on the setup screen could claim the same add-on, so switching one off switched something else off with it. Each add-on now belongs to exactly one card, and the last screen of the setup says how many are on rather than guessing.

• The accessibility check measures the two setup screens too. They were the newest screens in the app and the only ones the audit did not open.

• Eight accent presets, one click each. The three-colour picker stays for anyone who wants it. Every preset is checked against the same readability bar the picker warns you about, in light and in dark, before it can ship.

• The note that says what this release is about is in your language. It sits above the changelog in Settings, Advanced, Updates, in all twelve - because the person who most needs to hear that setup and settings were rethought is the one who does not read release notes in English. It retires itself when the build moves off this line, so it can never end up describing an older release.

Changed

• The setup asks what you want Skales to do, and builds the app around the answer. A new step at the end of the first run offers five kinds of work - Generative AI, Audio AI, Coding AI, Business agent, Personal agent - and each one switches on the add-ons that belong to it. Every individual switch stays on the same screen, so a bundle is a starting point and not a package. What gets stored is the add-ons, never the category. The sidebar is then built from that answer: an entry whose add-on is off is simply not in the list. Chat, memory, planner, tasks, schedule, history and Discover are not offered, because they are not a choice.
• Settings has a Standard view and an Advanced one, and Advanced still shows everything. The switch sits at the top of the page. Standard shows the settings your add-ons actually need; Advanced shows every setting there is, exactly as before. It is a view and not a state - anything switched on in Advanced stays on in Standard, only out of sight - and search reaches both, so typing what you are looking for finds it either way. A tab that would open onto an empty page in Standard is not offered. The Advanced view is not a list of dangerous things: Diagnostics, Updates, Export/Import and the data controls live in the Advanced tab and are shown in both views, because those are things ordinary users get sent to.
• An existing Skales is offered the new setup once, and loses nothing to it. A single notice, dismissable, that opens the same add-on screen with everything you already had left switched on. Settings, Advanced, Setup runs it again whenever you want. Nothing is deleted by either: chats, keys and settings stay exactly as they are, and only what is shown changes.
• Who belongs to whom is decided in one file. Which add-ons a category offers, which sidebar entries follow an add-on, and which settings sections the Standard view shows all used to be three separate lists kept in step by hand. They are one map now, and a test walks the real files to prove nothing is missing from it - an unplaced add-on or an unkeyed settings section fails the build rather than quietly becoming visible-to-everyone or invisible-to-everyone.
• Skales knows the interface it is actually running. The map the assistant answers "where do I find X" from is no longer written by hand: it is generated from the same files that build the sidebar, the Settings page and the Add-Ons list, and the build fails if the interface moves without it. So after a release that rearranged a great deal, asking Skales where something is gets the current answer rather than a confident description of the old app. The answer also says which view a setting is in and which add-on it follows.
• A new installation starts with the Desktop Buddy switched on. Buddy is the face of Skales - the skin is picked during setup and it is the most used thing in the app - and it was off unless you went looking for the switch. It now arrives on, introduces itself in your language the first time it appears, and points at Settings, General, where it is changed or switched off. An existing Skales is not touched: if you never turned Buddy on, it stays off, and if you turned it off, it stays off.
• Discover and Memory now stand on both sides of the sidebar. The feed and the working context used to live only in the Home view, so switching to Work took both away. They are core surfaces and follow you across the toggle.
• Wrapped is always on again. The yearly recap only works if its numbers are collected all year, so Wrapped is no longer an add-on you can switch off - which also means it returns for anyone who had it disabled. Its entry stays in the Home view only; nothing about what it collects has changed, and it still leaves your machine only if you share a card yourself.