v0.1.6-alpha.2: A Plugins Page Lands and the Sidebar Gains Office Previews, Browser Mode and Subagent Sessions

v0.1.6-alpha.1: Experimental Browser Use, Computer Use and Auto Review Open the 0.1.6 Series was followed two days later by the series’ second release: v0.1.6-alpha.2, published 2026-09-17 at 13:30 UTC with the prerelease flag on. The notes again span four sections, this time 29 items: 6 New Features, 8 Improvements, 9 Bug Fixes and 6 Chores.

A Plugins page, and five more sidebar entrances

The New Features section holds six items. The first is not in the sidebar: a new Plugins page for installing plugins, editing their configuration, and enabling or disabling them live. The remaining five all involve the sidebar:

• Conversations gain end-of-turn file change cards, with file-by-file comparison review in the sidebar.
• The sidebar previews Office files, currently supporting Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
• The sidebar opens a specified URL in browser mode.
• The sidebar opens Subagent conversations.
• The sidebar previews submitted plans.

Highlights from Improvements and Bug Fixes

The 8 Improvements and 9 Bug Fixes items are too many to walk one by one — what follows are highlights, not an exhaustive list. On the Improvements side: workspaces group by directory hierarchy; sidebar layouts persist and sidebar terminals keep their connections across refreshes; composer menus share one keyboard scheme — arrow keys to select, Enter or Tab to confirm, Escape to dismiss; Trajectory renders text, images and file attachments consistently, with attachment thumbnails in previews; thinking content renders in compact Markdown; context usage moves to the composer footer with details one click away; and CLI and Web startup waits shrink.

On the fix side: startup failures group errors and pending services with full diagnostics saved to a log file; pi-ai vision models are no longer misread as text-only, and input types can be adjusted manually; pending Inbox messages survive restarts; and request failures caused by Messages API endpoint construction and malformed historical tool inputs are fixed. The section’s last item sits under Bug Fixes but describes a permission-behavior change: Web user terminals run with system-user permissions, independently of the Agent sandbox mode — the notes give no motive.

The chores that carry migration weight

Of the six Chores items, the ones plugin developers and practitioners will feel directly:

• Plugin dependency resolution moves to runtime, and the Plugin Manager supports runtime unloading — the notes ask developers to check their loading and unloading logic.
• Client Sessions support multiple coexisting instances, with related API and slot changes.
• Creator mode removes the previous Cordis dynamic definition and execution tools, replaced by persistent plugins installed through the Plugin Manager.
• The default model list drops V4 Flash and V4 Flash Vision Exp.
• The CLI can launch a profile with dsh <profile>.
• Continuable Subagent chains default to at most 8 live children and a delegation depth of 1, adjustable in settings.

Channel status

alpha.2 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.