ByteAsk CLI 0.1.12
The previous release was 0.1.11 on 30 July. This one rebuilds the engine on all four
platforms and carries six weeks of our own work plus a large upstream merge.
Update with byteask --update, or pip install -U byteask, or npm i -g @byteask/cli.
Your transcript stays yours
/usage, /referral-code, /upgrade and /voucher used to print into your terminal's
real scrollback. Checking your quota wedged a dashboard permanently into the middle of
your conversation, and nothing could take it back.
They are panes now, like /model. They open over the composer, and esc closes them and
leaves the transcript exactly as it was.
enter never closes a pane. It only does what the footer says, so muscle memory trained
by /usage cannot fire a payment link on /upgrade.
The operator announcement banner is gone for the same reason. It inserted itself at the
top of every session and, being scrollback, could not be dismissed.
/usage tells you more, and tells the truth
The meters are twice the resolution and now show when each window resets.
5-hour ████████████████░░░░ 82% resets in 47m
Weekly ██████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 31% resets in 6d 23h
Extra $12.00 left of $15.00 · covers spend past your limits
Plan pricing used to read "$20/month". That was wrong. We sell a one-time 30-day pass, and
the pane now says so: one payment for 30 days, no auto-renew, your plan switches as soon
as payment completes. Your current plan is marked in the list.
Our pricing page still describes a monthly subscription. The page is what is out of date,
and we are fixing it.
You will stop being logged out
If you were ever stuck behind Reconnecting… 4/5 with no explanation, this is the release
that fixes it.
Sessions lasted 30 days and nothing renewed them. When yours expired, the client kept
sending the dead credential, and running /login could appear to succeed while the new
credential silently failed to save. One account sat locked out for six weeks.
Your session now renews itself quietly at launch, well before it expires. Anyone already
expired is healed on their next launch with no email round-trip. Renewal edits only the
credential, so your trusted projects, reasoning effort and configured tools all survive
it. And a credential that cannot be written now says so loudly instead of reporting
success.
Errors say what happened, immediately
Every unexpected response used to be treated as temporary. A "please sign in" or a plan
limit would spin Reconnecting… for about six seconds and then be replaced by a generic
retry error, so you never saw the sentence that told you what to do.
Only genuine server errors and rate limits retry now. Everything else is shown at once, in
our words. A failed payment link is one line telling you to contact us, rather than an
internal cause you cannot act on.
Models
The picker shows 20 models, up from 18, with nine new ones. auto is now a chain across
three models and two providers rather than a single fixed choice, so if one is having a
bad day your turn quietly lands on the next. Its first choice also got five times cheaper.
Model descriptions were rewritten so that "fast", "balanced" and "deep" mean the same thing
everywhere, instead of each vendor's marketing language.
Anthropic models are currently out of service and hidden.
Accessibility
A screen-reader mode renders panes as linear, announce-once text instead of in-place
repaints, and substitutes a plain symbol set when your terminal is not UTF-8. Turn it on
with --ax-screen-reader, the BYTEASK_AX_SCREEN_READER environment variable, or
tui.screen_reader in your config.
From upstream
We merged roughly 2,000 commits of upstream work. The parts you will notice:
New commands. /recap summarizes the conversation on demand. /cd and /pwd change
and show the working directory mid-conversation. /agents opens a command center grouping
your agent sessions into needs-input, working, ready and finished. /copy can now target
the last code block or quote, not just the whole response.
New subcommands. byteask queue --thread <session> --message "…" sends a message into
a running session from another terminal. byteask agents browses sessions across the
local daemon.
Sessions reconnect themselves when a connection drops, instead of dying and taking your
draft with it.
/keymap can genuinely rebind keys now, including two-key chords like g g.
Links in model output are clickable where your terminal supports it, including local
file paths that keep their line and column.
Vim mode gained undo and redo, dot-repeat, search motions, and character find.
The model can ask you structured questions - a small form with options rather than only
free text - and /status now shows this thread's token usage.
Two changes worth reading before you update
An auto-reviewer can now approve some risky actions without asking you, and it is on by
default. The permission menu offers an explicit choice between "Approve for me" and "Ask
for approval", and anything auto-denied is labelled in your approval history. If you want
to be asked about everything, choose "Ask for approval". Relatedly, what counts as
auto-approvable under "ask only when needed" is now decided by explicit rules rather than a
built-in guess about which commands are safe.
byteask exec --full-auto has been removed. It was deprecated with a warning in
0.1.11; it is now an error. Use --sandbox workspace-write. If you have scripts passing
it, they will fail on this version.
byteask mcp-server now warns that it is deprecated. It still works.
Under the hood
Our C/C++ and reference tools are no longer exposed to the internal thread that
summarizes your conversation. Upstream strips every tool from that thread because a
summarization prompt can contain untrusted text from your transcript; ours had no way to
be stripped, which meant tools that compile and run your code, and tools that make network
calls, were reachable from it. They are now excluded before that thread reads anything.
/referral-code prints all three share commands complete, rather than one whole and one
truncated. The installer tells you if a referral code was rejected instead of failing
silently, and reports where it put things and whether your PATH needs a change.
Known issues
- Upgrading is currently failing. Our payment provider began requiring a contact number
we do not collect. Everything else works normally. Email [email protected] and we will
sort your plan out directly.
- The update prompt still blocks startup with a yes/no question. It should be a line you
can ignore, and will be.
- The pricing page still describes a monthly subscription rather than the 30-day pass we
actually sell.