What's new in Houston

Houston 0.4.6

The "first run that feels like a game" release. Houston now opens with a guided tutorial that gets a brand-new user from cold app launch to a real, working assistant in under a minute, no form-filling, no docs. This is also the first cut that ships natively on Windows, the first one with a real Settings rail, the first one with a Sign-out button on connected providers, and the first one with the Outbound cold-email agent in the store.

What's new

• Video-game-style first-run tutorial. Replaces the old form-based onboarding with a guided flow: name your assistant, sign in to your AI provider, sign in to Composio so the agent has tools, then run a real chat against it. The "Try it" mission isn't a demo, it kicks off a real mission via the same chat surface used everywhere else, so the conversation lives on the Activity board and survives once the tutorial is done. Predefined chips (morning brief, meeting prep, weekly recap) make the first message zero-effort.
• Inline Composio sign-in card in chat. When the agent tries to call a tool that needs Composio and you're not signed in, it posts a connect card directly in the conversation. One click, you're authenticated, the agent retries. Mirrors the existing per-toolkit connect-card pattern so users never get bounced out to Settings to recover.
• Workspace UI tour. After graduation, a coachmark tour walks you through the agents area, tabs (Activity, Routines, Files, Job Description), Mission Control, Integrations, and the new "Guide me" pill in the tab bar. Replayable any time from that pill.
• Settings has a proper sidebar. The long-scrolling settings page is gone. Account, Workspace, Provider, Appearance, Language, Timezone, Connect phone, and Danger zone each live in their own section with one-click left-rail navigation.
• Sign out from Codex and Claude Code. Connected provider cards now have a "Sign out" link. It runs the official CLI logout command (claude auth logout clears the macOS Keychain entry, codex logout revokes the ChatGPT refresh token server-side), then re-surfaces the login flow inline.
• Outbound agent in the store. A new agent that runs the LinkedIn to Apollo to Instantly cold-email pipeline end-to-end. Find leads on LinkedIn, enrich via Apollo, send via Instantly, all from one chat.
• Connect phone moved into Settings. The phone-pairing QR, connection state, and the disconnect-all-phones reset now live together inside Settings under a BETA pill, instead of hanging off the global sidebar.
• Improved agent sidebar. Sidebar item rows pick up the work refactor from the new SidebarSectionNav, with cleaner spacing and active-state treatment.

Native Windows build

• Houston for Windows ships as a signed-by-minisign MSI installer alongside the Mac DMG. Same agent, same engine, same chat surface. Composio, codex, and claude-code all run as native Windows executables. No WSL, no Docker, no terminal anywhere in the install or first-run path.
• In-app auto-update on Windows. Once you're on a Houston for Windows build, future versions arrive the same way they do on Mac: a notification in the app, one click to install, automatic relaunch.
• Windows first-run hardening. Sign-in opens the OAuth URL through cmd /C start instead of macOS open (Windows users could not get past the sign-in screen before). The engine spawns with CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP so the parent app's console events stop killing the subprocess every couple of minutes (STATUS_CONTROL_C_EXIT). The bundled CLI resolver knows the MSI install layout, so claude-code and composio are found instead of silently skipped. Composio's first-time login writes your API key to the Windows Credential Manager via the same FFI-against-native-APIs pattern Houston uses on the macOS Keychain. No plaintext on disk.
• Project moved to the gethouston org. github.com/ja-818/houston is now github.com/gethouston/houston. The old URL still redirects, so existing clones, forks, and updater endpoints keep working.

Reliability

• Sessions no longer die at the first message when an unrelated copy of Claude Code lives elsewhere on your computer. Houston now talks directly to the version it manages itself, which is always kept in sync with what Houston was tested against. Previously, an older claude install on the same machine could intercept the call and reject newer flags, surfacing as a vague "app error."
• Auth errors are actually visible. Sign-in surfaces post-callback OAuth failures inline with human-readable messages (the common AADSTS codes plus Supabase identity-collision errors are mapped to actionable sentences) instead of silently logging.
• Updater uses the same minisign signing key for both OSes. The signing key controls who can ship updates to existing Houston installs, regardless of platform.

Before you upgrade

• Mac: quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Windows (first install): the MSI is not yet OS-code-signed (SignPath integration ships in a follow-up). You'll see a SmartScreen warning the first time. Click "More info" then "Run anyway." Once installed, future auto-updates run from a trusted parent process and don't show the warning.

If you are on 0.4.4 or 0.4.5 (Mac)

Houston should detect 0.4.6, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier (Mac)

Auto-update will not pull you forward from those builds. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are back on the healthy updater path and future versions apply automatically.

Known limitations

• Windows ARM64 not yet shipped. v0.4.6 is x64-only on Windows. ARM64 (Surface Pro X, etc.) is on the roadmap once we have demand to justify the second build pipeline.
• Windows MSI not yet OS-code-signed. SignPath Foundation integration is the next Windows-side PR. Until then, expect one SmartScreen "Run anyway" click on first install only.
• "Continue with Microsoft" sign-in is hidden for this release while we reconcile the Supabase Azure provider with the production callback URL. Google sign-in is unaffected.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.5

A reliability and polish release. Chat now recovers gracefully when a CLI provider misbehaves, attachments render in the conversation, the sidebar stays usable for agents with long names, and the language across Skills surfaces is consistent with the rest of the product.

What's new

• Skills surfaces now speak "Actions". The cards you used to see in Skills are the same ones you see elsewhere in the app, with consistent copy. Browsing, adding, and inspecting community Actions feels like one product, not two.
• A "+" button in the Running column. You no longer have to leave the board to start a mission. The Running column has its own footer button that opens New Mission with the composer already focused.
• Composer focus on new missions. Open New Mission and your cursor is already in the message box. Type, send, done.
• Attachments render inline. When you or an agent share a file in chat, you see it as a proper attachment card in the conversation, not a raw filename.
• Bug reports go straight to Linear. Send a bug from inside Houston and it lands as a ticket the team triages, with the diagnostics already attached.
• Sidebar controls stay visible for long agent names. The follow-up chip and the 3-dot menu no longer get pushed off-screen when an agent has a long name.

Reliability

• Recovery from malformed Claude requests. A specific class of provider error used to leave the chat stuck. Houston now surfaces a recovery card so you can retry without restarting the agent.
• Tool runtime errors show up as recovery cards. When a tool fails mid-mission, you see a card explaining what happened and offering a retry instead of a silent stall.
• Anthropic reconnect only fires when auth is confirmed. Houston no longer flashes reconnect prompts during the brief window before sign-in finishes resolving.
• Community skill search is hardened. Edge cases that used to throw or return empty when searching the community library are handled.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.

If you are on 0.4.3 or 0.4.4

Houston should detect 0.4.5, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier

Auto-update will not pull you forward from those builds. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are back on the healthy updater path and future versions apply automatically.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress. Engine compiles for Windows, signing and CI are next.
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.4

A maintenance release that validates the in-app updater path now that the relaunch fix from 0.4.3 is out in the wild. Also includes a small sidebar polish so you can tell at a glance whether the update applied.

What's new

• Sidebar follow-up chip is bigger and lives where it belongs. The "needs you" badge in the agent sidebar now sits flush right (the same slot the menu used to own), and it's a wider oval so the count is easier to read across the room. The 3-dot menu still appears in the same spot on hover, so renaming and deleting an agent works the way it did.

Why this release

The 0.4.2 build shipped with a broken in-app updater. The fix landed in 0.4.3, but anyone still on 0.4.2 cannot pick it up over the air. This 0.4.4 release exists to confirm the fixed updater is healthy on 0.4.3 installs and that future updates apply cleanly without manual reinstalls.

If you are on 0.4.3

Houston should detect 0.4.4, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own. You will see the sidebar chip change shape, that confirms the auto-update worked end-to-end.

If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier

Auto-update will not pull you forward. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over /Applications/Houston.app, and reopen. After that one manual step you are on the healthy updater path and 0.4.5 onward will apply automatically.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app. If in doubt: rm -rf /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress (engine compiles for Windows, signing and CI are next).
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.3

A reliability and polish release. Search across all your missions, see live agent activity right in the sidebar, queue follow-ups while an agent is mid-run, attach files with confidence, and a long list of small rough edges is gone.

What's new

• Search across every mission. A search field in Mission Control and the per-agent board scans titles first, then falls back to mission text and full conversation history. Translated empty/loading states, fast even on large workspaces.
• Mission search in the agent header. The search box now lives in the agent header next to the title (not buried in a menu), one keystroke from anywhere in the per-agent board.
• See agent activity in the sidebar. Each agent in the sidebar now shows whether it's idle, working, or waiting on you, so you can tell at a glance which agent is busy without opening it.
• Queue follow-ups mid-run. Type a follow-up while an agent is still working and Houston now batches it into one combined next turn instead of dropping it. Stop/Esc still works, and you can run parallel sessions in the same folder.
• Better attachments. Attachments now stream through binary upload sessions, large selections chunk cleanly, unsupported files are rejected with a clear message, and your composer draft is preserved if something goes wrong with the upload.
• Updater that actually relaunches. When Houston downloads a new version, the install + relaunch handoff is more reliable, no more orphaned splash window or "did it update?" guessing.
• Phone connection survives restarts. "Connect phone" pairings used to drop after a Mac sleep or quit. They now persist across restarts, so you don't have to re-scan the QR code every morning.
• OpenAI reconnect, no flapping. When Codex needed to reconnect to OpenAI, the UI sometimes flickered between connected and disconnected for a few seconds. The state machine is steady now.
• Codex recovers when its session file is gone. If the underlying Codex resume rollout file disappears or got corrupted, Houston now falls back gracefully instead of getting stuck on "resuming...".
• Codex config stays your config. Houston no longer rewrites your ~/.codex/config.toml behind your back. If you customize it, it stays customized.
• Composio integrations refresh on connect. Connecting a new Composio integration (Gmail, Slack, etc.) used to need a manual reload to show up in the agent. The list now refreshes the moment the OAuth window closes.
• Provider model picker scrolls. The model menu in agent creation no longer overflows the screen for providers with long model lists. It scrolls inside the menu.
• Cleaner Action picker. Categories that were empty or showed only one Action no longer get their own tab, so the tab bar in the Action picker doesn't waste space.
• Mission titles match your provider. The auto-summarized mission title is now generated by the same provider your agent is using, so styling and tone stay consistent.
• Bug reports go through cleanly. The Report bug button now sends through a native webhook path that doesn't get blocked by Tauri's network sandbox, so reports actually reach us.
• Tighter agent prompts. Houston's bundled agent prompts had drifted into long, repeating instructions. They've been pruned, agents stay on-character with less context overhead and quicker first responses.
• Skill search degrades gracefully. When skills.sh hits its search rate limit, Houston now backs off and shows cached results instead of erroring.

Behind the scenes

• Public changelog. gethouston.ai/changelog/ now shows release notes for every version, pulled live from GitHub. Linked from the top nav and footer.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS doesn't always replace a running app. If in doubt: rm -rf /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress (engine compiles for Windows, signing + CI are next).
• Mobile companion is still beta. Reconnects are now durable, but expect occasional hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.2

A polish release on top of 0.4.1. Cleaner chats, agents that actually use what they've learned, and a Legal agent rewritten so a non-technical founder reads the picker and instantly knows what every Action does.

What's new

• Cleaner chat. Long stretches of process detail (file reads, tool calls) now collapse into a single tidy block by default. Tap to expand when you want the full trace, ignore otherwise. The chat reads like a conversation again.
• Agents remember what they learned. Every agent now picks up its LEARNINGS.md automatically on every turn, so corrections stick across sessions instead of being forgotten the next time you open the app.
• Better chat summary. The "what changed this turn" summary now correctly attributes files generated by your agent and stops mislabeling external edits. Generated files surface in the summary instead of getting lost.
• Houston speaks human, by default. Every bundled agent now follows strict rules for talking to you: no file paths, no JSON, no command-line jargon, no narrating its own steps. Plain sentences, only what you need to act. If your agent ever slips into technical talk, that's now a bug we can fix.
• Legal agent, fully rewritten (v0.2.1). All 40 Legal Actions renamed and rewritten in founder voice. The picker now reads "Is this name free?", "Answer a customer data request", "Calculate my Delaware franchise tax", instead of cryptic slugs. Form labels match. The actual legal advice is unchanged, only the wrapping.
• Store updates clean up after themselves. When a bundled agent ships an update that renames Actions, your existing copy migrates to the new names automatically instead of accumulating duplicate old + new entries in your picker.
• Action selection sticks. When you pick an Action, it stays selected in the composer with a clear chip showing your choice, instead of getting dismissed on the next render.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS doesn't always replace a running app. If in doubt: rm -rf /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• Existing Legal agents installed from the Store will auto-migrate to v0.2.1 names on first launch. No action needed on your side.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress (engine compiles for Windows, signing + CI are next).
• Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnects. Keep your Mac awake while using it.

Houston 0.4.1

Big release. Sign in with Google, every Mac runs the same installer, the app speaks Spanish and Portuguese, your phone can manage Houston, and the major CLIs your agents use ship preinstalled. No terminal, no extra setup.

What's new

• Sign in with Google or Microsoft. Houston now has accounts. One click, native OAuth, your session lives in macOS Keychain (never in plain files). Sign out from the sidebar or Settings.
• Houston Store with curated agents. New Store tab ships with team-built agents you can install in one click, with built-in update checks. The store modal is simpler and the GitHub-import detour is gone, so creating an agent feels like adding an app.
• Actions everywhere. Skills are now called Actions and have a real UI. The empty chat shows up to 3 featured Actions, the picker has tabs by category and a Featured row, and starting an Action takes over the composer with a clean labeled form. The conversation shows your Action as a card with all the values you filled in.
• Empty board, one tap to start. Open an agent with nothing on its board and the New Mission picker pops automatically. No more staring at an empty kanban wondering where to click.
• Codex and Composio come bundled. Both CLIs ship inside the signed Houston app, so non-technical users get them preinstalled. Claude Code installs itself on first launch (one tap, no terminal). The download is bigger but the setup is one step.
• Friendly reconnect card when a CLI logs out. When Claude or Codex drops auth in the middle of a session, you now see a labeled card with a one-click reconnect instead of cryptic terminal noise in the chat.
• Functional bug reporter. When something goes wrong the toast says "Houston, we have a problem!" and the Report bug button actually sends the report straight to our team in Slack, with your email if you're signed in.
• Español y Português. Pick your language on first launch. Everything in the app, onboarding, sidebar, Mission Control, agent tabs, settings, dialogs, errors, flips live when you switch languages. Change it any time in Settings.
• One download for every Mac. The installer is now a universal binary, the same .dmg runs on Apple Silicon and Intel. No more guessing which one to grab.
• Mobile companion (beta). Tap "Connect phone" in the sidebar, scan the QR code with the Houston iOS app, and you can manage Houston from your phone. Your Mac stays the source of truth, the phone is a window into it. Action cards render on the phone too.
• Security disclaimer on first launch. A short, plain-English note about what AI agents can do on your behalf. Read once, accept, never see it again unless the terms change.
• Cleaner card actions. Rename, Delete, and Move to done are now three matching icon buttons with instant tooltips that say exactly what each one does.
• Mission Control caught up with the per-agent board. Renaming a card works there, opening a conversation actually shows chat history, and starting a New Mission lets you pick which agent runs it without leaving the page.
• Better link previews. Sharing gethouston.ai on WhatsApp, Slack, or Twitter now shows a real social card.

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston before installing. macOS doesn't always replace a running app. If in doubt: rm -rf /Applications/Houston.app and drag the new copy in.
• First launch is slightly slower while Claude Code installs itself in the background. You'll see a small status indicator.
• If you had accepted the disclaimer in a pre-release build, you'll be prompted once for the final copy. Takes 10 seconds.

Known limitations

• Windows support is still in progress (engine compiles for Windows, signing + CI are next).
• Mobile companion is beta. Expect occasional reconnects. Keep your Mac awake while using it.
• A handful of rare error messages from Claude or Codex still pass through in English even when you're running in Spanish or Portuguese.
• If you abort the Google sign-in popup on the wrong browser profile, just click the button again to retry.

Houston 0.4.0

First release on the new engine architecture.

What's new

• Product prompts now live in the app, engine is a standalone platform binary
• Data consolidates under ~/.houston/ (workspaces move out of ~/Documents/Houston/ automatically on first launch)
• Real-time reactivity restored — the board updates live when agents write files
• Race-free engine startup + sidecar signing + notarization verified in CI
• Drag-and-drop file attachments fixed
• Onboarding detects your Claude/Codex CLI from any standard install location
• Routines tab auto-detects your timezone (change it in Settings)

Before you upgrade

• Quit Houston first. macOS doesn't always replace a running app.
• Your workspaces will move from ~/Documents/Houston/ to ~/.houston/workspaces/ on first launch. The old location stays as a backup.
• If you have custom scripts pointing at the old path, update them.

Known limitations

• Claude and Codex CLIs must still be installed separately. Bundled-CLI install is coming in a later release.

See the assets to download and install this version.

See the assets to download and install this version.

See the assets to download and install this version.

Houston v0.2.0 — First Release

The framework for building AI agent desktop apps. Rebranded from Keel & Deck.

What's in the box

11 React packages (@houston-ai/*): core, chat, board, layout, workspace, skills, connections, events, routines, review, memory

8 Rust crates (houston-*): sessions, db, tauri, channels, events, scheduler, memory, skills

Houston App: Unified desktop app with experience system — host multiple AI agent experiences in one app

Experience System: Three tiers — JSON-only manifests, custom React bundles, custom Rust capabilities

Quick Start

npx create-houston-experience my-agent
cd my-agent
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev

Links

• npm: @houston-ai
• crates.io: search houston-