mindfork 0.9.6 — the model can see

mindfork 0.9.6 is out. The headline is images: you can now show the model a picture. The quieter half of the release is about what the assistant is not allowed to reach.

Show it a picture

/image attach <path> puts an image on your next message. /image paste takes one straight off the clipboard, so a screenshot needs no file at all — Ctrl+V does it too, in terminals that let the key through (Windows Terminal keeps that combination for its own paste, which is exactly why the command exists). /image attach https://… downloads the picture and stages it the same way; the image itself is stored in the conversation, so it keeps working later even if the link stops working.

It works with a local vision-capable model — start llama-server with a projector — and with all four cloud providers. png, jpeg, webp, gif and bmp are accepted and converted to what each provider takes, and a large image is shrunk once, when you attach it, rather than costing you the upload on every later turn. If the engine says it cannot see images, the attach is refused up front and tells you what to change, instead of failing at send time.

An image an MCP tool returns reaches the model too, so a screenshot or a chart a plugin produces can actually be looked at. That one comes with a switch in settings — "Let servers send images", on by default — because instructions can be painted into pixels where you would not see them.

The web tools stop at your front door

fetch_url and the pages web_search reads now refuse addresses that are not on the public internet: your own machine, your LAN, and the address cloud providers keep their credentials behind.

This matters because of where the assistant's links come from. They are rarely typed by you — they come off a page it just fetched, a search result, or a document you attached. Any of those can ask it to open something on your side of the router, and until this release nothing stopped it.

If you do want one reachable — a wiki or a dashboard on your network — there is a new switch in settings → Tools: Allow local addresses, off by default. Attaching an image by address, which you type yourself, is unaffected, and so is the address of your own engine.

A blip no longer costs the turn

When a cloud provider rate-limits or sheds load, the request is now retried — three attempts with a short backoff, honouring the provider's own Retry-After. This matters most in a long turn: one blip on the eighth tool round used to throw away the whole turn's work. Retries stop as soon as the answer starts arriving, so nothing you have already read is re-generated and no tool runs twice.

Related, and overdue: a reply that gets cut off now says so. When the engine failed after the answer had started, the fragment used to sit on screen looking like the whole reply.

Also in this release

• mindfork demo — the interactive demo mode announced when this site went up ships in this release: the real TUI on seeded data with a scripted engine, no model download, no API key, nothing written outside a temp folder.
• The Windows installer now shows the MIT license and the disclaimer during installation, rather than only dropping them next to the binary afterwards.
• Esc interrupts a request that is still connecting, and a network failure shows its reason instead of a bare URL.

The full list is in the changelog. Downloads — Windows installer and archive, Linux archive, .deb, .rpm and .pkg.tar.zst — are on the releases page.