ByteAsk changelog

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.14

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 16:25:17 GMT

ByteAsk CLI 0.1.14

The previous release was 0.1.13 on 20 September. This one rebuilds the engine on all four platforms.

Update with byteask --update, or pip install -U byteask, or npm i -g @byteask/cli.

Use your ChatGPT subscription

ByteAsk can run on a ChatGPT Plus (or higher) subscription instead of ByteAsk credits. Choose it from /login. This option is being switched on in stages over the coming days, so you may not see it yet.

Sign-in happens in a pane inside ByteAsk. When it finishes or you press esc, the pane closes and leaves nothing behind in your terminal.
ChatGPT Free and Go plans are refused at sign-in with a clear message, because OpenAI serves no coding models on them. The refusal happens before anything is saved, so an existing sign-in is kept. From the refusal screen you can try a different account or go back.
The model picker lists only the models your subscription can use: gpt-6-astra,
To switch back, use /login and choose Use ByteAsk managed.

Fixes

ByteAsk now identifies itself as ByteAsk on every connection type: your own API key, under another product's name on those paths.
Questions about ByteAsk itself are now answered from ByteAsk's documentation.
The Token usage: … line no longer prints when a session ends.
The background app-server no longer tries to install or update another product.
The browser pages at the end of a sign-in, and the device-code screen, now show ByteAsk branding.

Known issue

The Windows engine is not code-signed yet. Windows 11 Smart App Control may block it. If that happens, use WSL2 or chat.byteask.ai. Do not turn Smart App Control off.

Read the full release notes

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.13

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 20:37:10 GMT

ByteAsk CLI 0.1.13

The previous release was 0.1.12 on 8 September. This one rebuilds the engine on all four platforms.

Update with byteask --update, or pip install -U byteask, or npm i -g @byteask/cli.

Less noise in the model's context

Command output is now cleaned before the model reads it. Colour codes and progress-bar redraws are removed, repeated lines are folded into a count, and long build, install and test logs keep every warning, error and summary line while the routine lines are counted. The full original output is always saved on your machine, and the model can open it when it needs a line that was folded away. What you see in your own terminal does not change.

ByteAsk can also read several files, or several ranges of one file, in a single step, and search with context lines, instead of one shell command per file.

Long sessions hold up better after the history is compacted: the agent keeps a note of the files it had open and its most recent results, so it does less re-exploring.

C and C++

cpp_sanitize accepts sanitizer: "tsan", so data races can be found. It can also build your project's own CMake or Make target with sanitizers on, so a multi-file program no longer needs every source file listed.
On macOS a clean sanitizer run now says that leaks were not checked (LeakSanitizer does not exist on macOS). It used to read as a clean result.
debug_record (rr) handles bugs that fail one run in twenty: it can record under rr's chaos scheduler until a run fails and then replay that run, including backwards. When rr cannot work on a machine it says why, and what to use instead.
cpp_symbolize resolved caller frames to the wrong line. Fixed.
cpp_layout reported nested members of unknown size as padding. Fixed.
cpp_godbolt could pick the wrong compiler for a request like "clang 18". Fixed.
cpp_binary can explain a link failure caused by a libstdc++ ABI mismatch, and its header view shows the NX and RELRO state.
cpp_compile_db can generate compile_commands.json for Makefile projects.
A Python project with a Makefile no longer gets the C/C++ guidance, and a repository whose C++ sits several folders down now does.
debug_attach no longer offers a gdb session that has already exited.

Account and updates

/upgrade: on a Pro plan the arrow keys did not move. Fixed; Pro can be renewed from the picker.
/usage shows your plan in its title.
The update check now reads ByteAsk's own feed, and it is on. It had been off since the first release.
The referral programme no longer grants a free Pro month, and the footer and hints that still mentioned it are gone. Referral credit is unchanged.
The plugin marketplace is off by default. features.plugins = true in ~/.byteask/config.toml turns it back on.
/export suggested a file name that was not ours. It now suggests byteask-session.md.
Old state from before the rename is cleared from ~/.byteask on launch. Your sign-in, settings and history are kept.

Known issue on Windows 11

The Windows engine is not code-signed yet. Where Smart App Control is on, Windows can block it without showing a message. Please do not turn Smart App Control off, because Windows cannot turn it back on without a reset. Until the signed build is out, WSL2 and chat.byteask.ai both work.

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.12

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 13:11:36 GMT

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 founders@byteask.ai 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.

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.11

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:05:09 GMT

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.11

Highlights:

Operator alerts rendered at the top of the session
/login rebuilt as a native bottom-pane settings surface
byteask exec now renders extension tool calls (cpp_*/ref_*) - previously invisible
cpp-tools: real sanitizer output, project builds, bounded execution, trust gate
Hardware-aware performance verification

Read the full release notes

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.10

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 11:54:53 GMT

What's new

Status/result messages (e.g. key-add errors) no longer leak onto unrelated screens after navigating away.
install.sh / install.ps1 now say plainly when a best-effort ripgrep install didn't work, instead of failing silently.

All 4 platform binaries included below.

Read the full release notes

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.9

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 10:08:07 GMT

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.9

Security & abuse-resistance hardening.

Engine unchanged from 0.1.8 - the binaries below are identical; 0.1.9 ships client + gateway improvements.

Install: curl -fsSL https://code.byteask.ai/install.sh | sh · pip install byteask · npm i -g @byteask/cli

Binaries are gzip-compressed; SHA256SUMS lists the checksums.

Read the full release notes

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.8

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 20:18:45 GMT

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.8

See your tools working - every ByteAsk tool call (autosar_ref, mcu_ref, cpp_godbolt, debug, …) now shows a live cell in the TUI with the tool name, arguments, and result - the same visibility web search always had. Interrupted calls show cleanly; retryable tool replies no longer render as failures.
Referral upgrades - you AND your friend now each get $10 of usage per referral, and 3 successful referrals earn your first month of Pro free. /referral-code shows your live progress.
Reliability: turn-abort no longer leaves stuck in-progress items in thread history.

Install: curl -fsSL https://code.byteask.ai/install.sh | sh · pip install byteask · npm i -g @byteask/cli

Binaries are gzip-compressed; SHA256SUMS lists the checksums.

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.7

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:13:07 GMT

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.7

Grounded reference tools - autosar_ref, mcu_ref, fpga_ref, hft_ref, grid_ref, scpi_ref, x86_ref: page-cited lookups over the ByteAsk corpus for embedded / firmware / hardware / safety-critical C++ (MISRA, AUTOSAR, Intel SDM, IEEE 1547, SCPI, Xilinx, ITCH, and more).
Renamed the native-debugger tools - cpp_debug/cpp_debug_session/cpp_debug_attach/cpp_record → debug/debug_session/debug_attach/debug_record (they debug any native binary, including Rust).
Removed the /app slash command.
Gateway maintenance: auto model routing, Gemini/Anthropic reliability fixes.

Install: curl -fsSL https://code.byteask.ai/install.sh | sh · pip install byteask · npm i -g @byteask/cli

Binaries below are gzip-compressed; SHA256SUMS lists the checksums.

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.6

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 13:37:30 GMT

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.6 - fixes API-key paste hanging on macOS Terminal (wrapper terminal-reset). Engine binaries unchanged from v0.1.5.

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.5

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:44:48 GMT

Read the full release notes

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.4

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 13:59:30 GMT

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.4 - Gemini/Anthropic fixes (CRLF SSE, tool-schema, thought-signature), gateway model allowlist, Linux bubblewrap auto-install + sandbox fallback, referral across curl/pip/npm, catalog trim (Sonnet 4.5 removed).

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.3

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:53:57 GMT

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.3 - the AI coding agent for your terminal.

Engine binaries for all supported platforms are attached below; installers fetch the latest automatically.

Install

macOS / Linux: curl -fsSL https://code.byteask.ai/install.sh | sh
Windows (PowerShell): irm https://code.byteask.ai/install.ps1 | iex
pip install byteask · npx @byteask/cli

Verify downloads against SHA256SUMS.

ByteAsk changelog

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.14

ByteAsk CLI 0.1.14

Use your ChatGPT subscription

Fixes

Known issue

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.13

ByteAsk CLI 0.1.13

Less noise in the model's context

C and C++

Account and updates

Known issue on Windows 11

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.12

ByteAsk CLI 0.1.12

Your transcript stays yours

/usage tells you more, and tells the truth

You will stop being logged out

Errors say what happened, immediately

Models

Accessibility

From upstream

Two changes worth reading before you update

Under the hood

Known issues

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.11

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.10

What's new

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.9

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.9

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.8

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.8

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.7

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.7

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.6

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.5

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.4

ByteAsk CLI v0.1.3

`/usage` tells you more, and tells the truth