What's New

The headline changes in recent Paddock releases, newest first. These are the things you’ll notice — not an exhaustive changeset. For the full, per-package detail see the changelogs on GitHub (server, web).

Reading older entries

Each entry describes a release as it shipped. Some things were refined later — for example the separate set_schedule and set_hook self-management tools below were unified into a single set_trigger family in a subsequent release.

A theme runs through this stretch: Paddock grew from a place to chat with agents into a place where agents run on their own — fired by events and schedules, spawning and reporting back to each other — with the UI making all that unattended work legible at a glance.

0.38 — Send files & images to a keeper

• Attachments in the composer. Attach files and images to a message — pick them with the paperclip, drag & drop onto the composer, or paste (⌘V / Ctrl+V) a screenshot straight in. Staged files sit in a removable tray; images preview as thumbnails, everything else as a chip. The keeper reads them directly — native vision on images and PDFs, plain-text reads on the rest — and sent files stay with the chat, re-rendering on reload. Per-instance and per-project caps (default 25 MB/file, 10 files/message, all types) keep it sane. See Sending files & images.

0.37 — Triggers, unified

• One Triggers tab. The per-project Hooks tab and the Settings → Schedules section merged into a single Triggers list. Every trigger type — schedule, event, and the reserved webhook — lives in one place, each row showing its type, its firing condition, a capability summary, and an enabled toggle.
• One self-management surface. The old set_hook / set_schedule tool families are replaced by unified set_trigger / list_triggers / remove_trigger, carrying the trigger type, its run, and enabled — so a keeper declares any kind of trigger the same way.
• Schedules can be scoped. A schedule that declares a tool allow-list now runs on its own scoped agent with just those tools (like an event trigger); a schedule with no tools keeps running as the keeper, as before.
• The sweeper is a trigger. Post-turn curation is now the implicit default curate-overview trigger — declare one to give a project a bigger model or extra instructions, or disable it entirely. Undeclared projects curate exactly as before. See The sweeper.

Webhook triggers are reserved

The webhook trigger type is shape-reserved — it appears in the model and the Triggers form but is not yet fireable (there’s no inbound webhook ingress yet).

0.36 — Streaming, and session mode by default

• Token-by-token streaming. In session mode a keeper’s reply now accretes into the live bubble as it’s written, instead of appearing all at once when the turn finishes. (Batch mode still renders each message whole.) See Token-by-token streaming.
• Session mode is the default. A fresh instance now drives keeper turns through the persistent session (SDK) runtime by default, so cross-turn autonomy (ScheduleWakeup, /loop) and streaming work out of the box. PADDOCK_KEEPER_DRIVE_MODE=batch (and the per-project driveMode) still switch back to the one-shot path.
• The trigger foundation. Under the hood, hooks and schedules were unified onto one discriminated trigger model (schedule / event / webhook) over a single execution core — the groundwork the 0.37 Triggers tab is built on.

0.35 — Keepers that unstick themselves

• Keeper-chat recovery. When a keeper starts a background task and ends its turn while it’s still running, the task can be killed at the turn boundary and leave the keeper idle-but-alive. Paddock now surfaces that as a distinct amber “background task terminated — the keeper is idle” affordance with a one-click Continue that wakes the keeper to finish or report. An optional automatic re-drive (off by default) does the same without you. See Keeper-chat recovery.

0.34 — Event hooks

• Event hooks. Run an agent turn automatically when a lifecycle event fires. The first event is onArchive — when a chat is archived, each of the project’s enabled hooks fires as its own agent. A hook’s granted tools are its capability: a hook that must tidy up is given Bash and does the work itself. New hooks start disabled, so nothing runs until you arm it.
• Hook chats are visible and legible. A hook run shows up in the chat list with a small lightning-bolt badge, and opening it floats a read-only banner telling you it’s a hook agent, what event triggered it, and exactly which tools it was granted.
• Manage hooks from a chat. Keepers with the opt-in hook MCP can declare, edit, and remove their own hooks (list_hooks / set_hook / remove_hook).
• Steer the sweeper per project. Drop a .paddock/hooks/sweep.md file in a project and its contents are appended to the sweeper’s instructions — so each project can shape how its OVERVIEW.md / CHANGELOG.md get curated.

0.33 — Who sent this, and a lighter stream

• Per-message attribution. Machine-injected turns now say who added them — ”↩ sent by ⟨chat⟩” for a send_message from another chat, or ”⏰ scheduled by ⟨name⟩” for a schedule fire. Human-typed messages stay unlabelled. An injected message also streams into an already-open chat immediately, no refresh needed.
• Schedule yourself from a chat. New self-management tools let a keeper create and manage its project’s durable schedules (set_schedule / remove_schedule / list_schedules) — “schedule yourself to triage issues every morning” — not just a human clicking through Settings.
• Cheaper streaming. The CPU cost of watching a chat stream dropped sharply: the continuous 60fps animations were trimmed, respect prefers-reduced-motion, and pause while the tab is in the background.

0.32 — Schedules & run history

• Scheduled chats. A project can declare schedules (cron or interval) that start a chat on their own. A scheduled run is a first-class chat — it streams live, is re-attachable, and a human can open it and keep the conversation going. Manage them from a Schedules section in the project’s Settings, including enable/disable and trigger-now.
• “While you were away.” A new project History tab lists recent runs with their origin (human / scheduled / spawned), flags the ones that are new since you last looked, and banners how many ran unattended — so cron-fired and agent-spawned work is easy to find and open.

0.31 — Provenance, spawn-depth & YAML config

• Provenance badges. The chat list marks scheduled and spawned chats with a subtle icon, so the runs that happened without you stand out from the ones you started. Human chats stay unadorned.
• Spawned children can report back. A chat spawned by another chat now gets the self-management tools (bounded by a new maxSpawnDepth, default 1), so a child can send_message its parent when it’s done — enabling the manager-agent pattern without runaway recursion.
• Configure an instance from a YAML file. Instead of a long list of PADDOCK_* environment variables, an instance can keep its settings in a single paddock.config.yaml — with environment variables still overriding the file. Env-only deployments are unaffected.

0.30 — Files, Changes & self-archiving

• Browse into subdirectories. The Files tab now lets you click into folders, with deep-linkable, refresh-safe URLs and a breadcrumb — so anything a project filed under design/, docs/, etc. is finally reachable.
• Selective commits. The Changes tab gained a checkbox per changed file (with select-all/none) and a “Commit N selected” action, a +A −R line stat per file, and a dirty-file count on the projects grid so pending work is visible before you open a project.
• Agents can archive themselves. New archive_chat / unarchive_chat self-management tools power the “do the work, then archive myself on success; leave un-archived on failure so a human sees it” convention.

0.29 — First-class MCP tool rendering

• Paddock’s own tools render as first-class UI. Every mcp__… tool call now shows a humanized name (mcp__paddock_manage__create_chat → “Create chat”) with a brand badge instead of the raw string, and the paddock_manage tools get rich bodies parsed from their output — project chips, a chat list with live running dots, transcript previews — that link straight into the chats they touched.

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Maintaining this page: add a short, user-facing entry here whenever you cut a release (see RELEASING.md).