v0.1.6-alpha.1: Experimental Browser Use, Computer Use and Auto Review Open the 0.1.6 Series

v0.1.5-rc.2: A Polish-Only Candidate — Feedback Dialogs and File-Card Refinements closed this site’s coverage of the 0.1.5 series. Five days after that release, upstream opened a new series: v0.1.6-alpha.1, published 2026-09-15 at 04:57 UTC with the prerelease flag on. Where rc.2’s notes carried two items in a single Improvements section, alpha.1’s carry 44 items across four sections: 8 New Features, 14 Improvements, 8 Bug Fixes and 14 Chores.

Three experimental agent surfaces

The New Features section leads with three items the notes label experimental:

• Browser Use, “through Playwright MCP, Chrome DevTools MCP, and Stagehand browser backends.”
• Computer Use, “through Cua Driver MCP or the native driver for local computer interaction and screenshots.”
• Auto review mode.

The notes apply the experimental label to all three and define it nowhere — this article reports the label as written and will not invent a stability policy behind it. What the notes do give is concrete plumbing: named MCP backends for Browser Use, and a choice of MCP driver or native driver for Computer Use.

A terminal, archived sessions and remote workspaces

The remaining New Features items reshape where DSH runs and how sessions live:

• The Web sidebar gains terminals with multiple tabs, shell selection and recovery after page refreshes. An Improvements item polishes the same surface — better text and cursor contrast, application colors preserved across theme changes — while noting the notes’ own hedge: new views after refresh do not yet restore those colors.
• Settings gains an archived-session list for browsing and restoring sessions.
• Headless can read tasks from standard input, resume an existing session with --session-id, and emit run events as newline-delimited JSON with --json.
• File, command and PTC tools are extended so DSH can run locally while using a remote workspace over SSH.

MCP grows resources and moves to SDK v2

Two items land on MCP from opposite ends. A New Features item adds resource discovery and reading, and URI templates, with shared resource tools available “after configuring an MCP server in a built-in Profile.” An Improvements item upgrades the stack to “the official SDK v2 with protocol negotiation, paginated tool lists, and support for servers without tools.”

Highlights from Improvements and Bug Fixes

The 14 Improvements and 8 Bug Fixes items are too many to walk one by one — what follows are highlights, not an exhaustive list. Beyond the terminal polish above: file, Skill reference and delivered-file links are previewed in the sidebar by default; turn durations switch to hours, minutes and seconds once a run exceeds an hour; Node PTC’s run_code gains per-call timeouts with a default of 120 seconds and a maximum of 600; and image resizing and token estimates are adapted for DeepSeek V4.1, raising the default request-image size and encoding quality. On the fix side: session recency sorting is corrected with manual order preserved after refreshes; turn-based forks no longer include inputs and settings from later turns; file edit cards show line-level changes with corrected added/deleted counts; and subagent completion notices now pass only body text, fixing reasoning blocks that failed parent-session Messages requests — saved notices are unchanged.

The chores that carry migration weight

The 14-item Chores section holds the changes practitioners will feel most:

• DeepSeek defaults to the Messages protocol, with uploaded images reusable through the Files API. Custom API addresses are preserved; a manually configured old official root URL must be removed or changed to https://api.deepseek.com/anthropic.
• PTC packages and services rename to the ptc-runtime family without legacy aliases, and the workflow executor becomes workflow-ptc under the session file policy — Python PTC is not supported there.
• The built-in E2B execution backends are removed, and Ralph is disabled by default (enable it explicitly if needed).
• agent/session-start is replaced by agent/created, an asynchronous, serial initialization for which the first model request waits; the synchronous Session history APIs snapshotEvents, eventAt and ownEvents are deprecated.
• Experimental Team mode consolidates on spawn_teammate, turning subagent and subagent_fork off, with the default teammate creation limit raised from 8 to 16.
• Node PTC runs in separate processes under the session file policy with output and heap limits — and process.env is empty, so code relying on the previous environment must migrate.
• Hot reload loses transactional rollback: parse failures preserve the original configuration, but activation failures may leave partial changes that require correction.

Quieter chores still worth a line: an image offload session event survives recovery and forks; the request-image cache moves to DSH_HOME/cache/attachments/request-images; SandboxProvider.confine and ShellExecutor.start become cancellable asynchronous interfaces with preparation time counted toward timeouts; and session events can be reported with requests when the DeepSeek model adapter connects to the official API endpoint — experimental, currently enabled, and disableable in configuration.

Channel status

alpha.1 keeps the Pre-release flag. Every release published on the channel so far remains flagged prerelease — no stable build exists. Live repo metadata stays in this site’s build-time snapshot and stats page; this article cites no point-in-time star counts.