Changelog

The first notarized release: the macOS desktop app now opens without a workaround. Plus explainers from your phone, a narrated tour of each release, and a short brief on every project.

Phone

• Create explainers from your phone. Tap Explain… on a bead, an epic or a project, or Explain something in Listen, then pick a subject, add a focus and choose audio or video. A progress bar shows while the explainer is made, and a push notification tells you when it is ready or has failed.

Explainers

• A narrated UI tour for each release. Each release can now come with an explainer that walks through what's new, in the order of the release notes, with screenshots of the changed views. Turn it off with [release] tour = false, or make one yourself with bees release-tour.

More

• A short project brief: done, in progress, next. A project's Beads › Summary view now opens with a few plain sentences on what was done recently, what is in progress, what comes next and what needs you, with links to the work it mentions. The same one-liner shows in the project's Overview tooltip, on the phone, and through the API and MCP.
• Release notes written from the work that landed. bees release-notes builds a 'What's new' from the issues and outcomes merged in a version range. Releases now use it for their notes, and the app bundle carries a copy you can read offline.
• Account section in Settings. Settings now has an Account section where you can sign in with your browser or a code, see your plan and license state, refresh it or sign out. Accounts are off for now, and nothing local ever needs one.
• Opt-in usage stats and a relay beta waitlist. You can choose to share a weekly report of feature counts (no names, paths or text), and you can read the whole report before anything is sent. You can also join the relay beta waitlist in Settings or with bees waitlist. Nothing is sent yet, because the server is not live, and the app will ask you only once.
• Optional local model for quick background asks. With [claude.local] turned on, short structured tasks like triage, summaries and drafts can run on a local model behind an Anthropic-compatible endpoint. If the local model is unreachable or gives a bad answer, the task runs on Claude instead. This is off by default, and agents and explainers always use Claude.
• Push beads data only when nothing is working. bees push-beads pushes a project's beads data only when no swarm or background agent is running in it. It shows progress, and you can cancel it safely. You can also schedule a daily push with [swarm] beads_push, and it stops by itself if work starts.

Fixes (8)

• Beads and chats open fast on the phone again. Opening a bead, the bead list or a chat no longer takes up to a minute while swarms are busy. Pages now load from cached data in well under a second and refresh in the background.
• Auto layout works on dual-screen phones. Auto now detects the system column on a dual-screen phone used as a Home Screen app and puts a slim right rail next to it. The fold position is also more accurate when unfolded.
• Answered decisions stay answered. A decision you answer or dismiss no longer comes back a little later, after a reload, or on another device. The hub now keeps track of answered decisions, so the desktop, the phone and every other view agree right away.
• Chat follows the conversation after /clear. After /clear or /resume in a tab, including the Beekeeper and Queen tabs, Chat now switches to the new conversation and marks the switch with a divider. Resume and the phone's Queen chat follow the new conversation too.
• Beekeeper's suggestion chips are no longer cut off. The row of suggestion chips in the Beekeeper's chat ('What needs me?', 'Summarise today') is no longer clipped at the top. New checks also confirm that switching between Chat and Terminal keeps the same tab.
• Merge conflicts wait for a free agent instead of asking you. When a merge conflicts while every agent slot is busy, the swarm now waits for a slot and starts the resolver ahead of new work, without asking you to fix the branch. You are asked only when the resolver has tried and given up.
• No more two swarms working on the same task. Auto mode can no longer pick up work from a swarm that is still starting. If two swarms ever do end up holding the same task, the later one drops it and says so in its log.
• App icon has no white corners. The app and phone icons now fill their corners with the dark tile colour, so no white shows around the logo in notifications or on tiles.

Under the hood (5)

• Updates now come from the repository's new home. The updater, installer and release scripts now point to vindhyadatascience/bees, and installs that still use the old address are redirected.
• License, third-party notices and notarization groundwork. Builds now include a LICENSE file and third-party notices, and the scripts for notarized Mac releases are ready.
• Server for usage stats and the waitlist. There is now a small hosted server, with a privacy page, that will receive the opt-in reports and waitlist sign-ups.
• Groundwork for Windows builds. Unix-only code is now kept in separate platform files, so every part of bees builds for Windows.
• Trial of cheaper models for small agent tasks. A test swarm compared the quality and cost of different models for each task.

Auto mode arrives: bees keeps swarming a project's ready work until it runs out, is blocked on you, or you stop it.

Auto mode

• Turn on auto mode for a project and bees groups newly ready beads into swarms by epic, dependencies and file overlap, then starts them as earlier work lands.
• Exclusions, limits and a pause when your Claude usage runs high keep auto mode from running away with your plan.
• bees tells you when a project goes idle or its work is done, and auto mode has a toggle and badge on the desktop, the phone, the CLI and MCP.

Swarms

• Each agent gets its own setup and teardown scripts and its own ports, so several copies of an app can run at once.
• Agents run on a model suited to their bead, and a running agent hears about it when its bead's description changes.
• Finished agents' sessions stay resumable after their worktree is cleaned up.
• Optional nightly full checks on each project's default branch.

Explainers

• Explainers of terminal and CLI changes now include captures of the terminal, next to the code tour.
• Screenshot recipes are approved with their test screenshots shown inline.

Phone

• Start a swarm from a bead's detail page on the phone.
• Two-pane layouts on large phones and foldables use the whole screen.

Fixes (5)

• Swarm merges are queued across all projects, one at a time, so two projects never run their checks at once.
• A one-off flaky test reruns instead of sending the bead to a resolver agent.
• An agent that stopped on an API error no longer shows as asking you something.
• The phone's tab bar stays at the bottom while you scroll.
• The explainer tour shows the code at the end of the range, not your working tree.

A Queen for each project, the Beekeeper over all of them, and phone chat that works like the Claude app.

Queen and Beekeeper

• Each project has a Queen, a Claude session that directs its work, and the Beekeeper looks after all of your projects at once.

Phone

• Phone chat looks and behaves like the Claude app, with paste and screenshot attachments.

Fixes (1)

• The phone's swarm flow graph is no longer cut off at the bottom.

Direct your projects from your phone.

Phone

• Chat with a project's Queen, or the Beekeeper, from your phone to direct development.
• See each swarm's flow graph and start work, browse beads with their comments, and read agent logs and live terminals.

Decisions

• Actions that change things now file an approval in your decision inbox, so nothing happens behind your back.

App

• Optional project colours, shown in the sidebar and the terminal workspace picker.
• The status line shows whether you are up to date.

Run means swarm, and the phone sets itself up.

Swarms

• Run on a bead starts a swarm, with checks and a merge, instead of a loose background agent.
• A swarm waits for blockers outside its own set of beads.

Phone

• Settings › Phone sets up Tailscale serving for you.

Under the hood (1)

• The app and its bundled CLI are signed.