Backfill issue -074 — The AI Toolchain

EDITIONS tail grep head diff uniq

The daily firehose — everything the toolchain shipped today, already filtered.

// HOW THIS ISSUE IS MADE

We read every release from the 174 tools on our watchlist at the source — GitHub and GitLab release notes, vendor release pages and changelogs, project blogs and feeds, vendor press releases, and the source code behind the tag. Bug-fix-only releases and non-product newsroom noise are dropped; what's left is summarized down to the new capability, how to try it, and any screenshots or videos the release itself published. Every entry links to the sources it was built from.

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$ tct list   # 3 tools matched

AI & LLM Tooling

◆ AI Coding Agents

Anthropic Claude Code

v2.1.166 NOTES

Claude Code is an agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal, understands your codebase, and helps you code faster by executing routine tasks, explaining complex code, and handling git workflows - all through natural language commands.

Claude Code v2.1.166 adds fallback model chains, glob-based tool deny rules, and hardened cross-session security.

└──▷ GET THIS VERSION

$ git clone --branch v2.1.166 https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code.git
# already have the repo? check out this version:
$ git checkout v2.1.166

└──▷ TRY IT

Run a model that thinks by default without extended thinking to reduce latency and token cost.

$ MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=0 claude -p "Analyze this code for vulnerabilities" < main.go

›Adds fallbackModel setting to configure up to three fallback models tried in order when the primary model is overloaded or unavailable; --fallback-model now also applies to interactive sessions.
›Adds glob pattern support in deny rule tool-name position ("*" denies all tools); allow rules reject non-MCP globs, and unknown tool names in deny rules warn at startup.
›Hardens cross-session messaging: messages relayed via SendMessage from other Claude sessions no longer carry user authority — receivers refuse relayed permission requests, and auto mode blocks them.
›Enables disabling thinking on models that think by default via the Claude API using MAX_THINKING_TOKENS=0, --thinking disabled, or the per-model thinking toggle (3P providers unchanged).
›Retries a turn once on the fallback model when the API rejects an unexpected non-retryable error; auth, rate-limit, request-size, and transport errors still surface immediately.

+2 moreshow less

›claude update now announces the target version before downloading.
›In claude agents, typing a URL into the session list now filters to the session whose first prompt contained it.

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◆ AI Agent Frameworks

Nous Research Hermes

v2026.6.5 NOTES

The agent that grows with you

Hermes v2026.6.5 ships a native desktop app, browser admin panel, /undo, fuzzy model picker, and NVIDIA skills tap.

└──▷ GET THIS VERSION

$ git clone --branch v2026.6.5 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent.git
# already have the repo? check out this version:
$ git checkout v2026.6.5

└──▷ TRY IT

Back up a conversation that went off the rails and re-send your last message with edits, without losing the session.

$ /undo 3

Drop into the classic CLI interface for a single invocation even if your default is set to TUI.

$ hermes chat --cli

Run the Nous Portal quick-setup flow to go from a fresh install to a configured, chatting agent in seconds.

$ hermes portal

›Adds Hermes Desktop — a native Electron app for macOS, Linux, and Windows with streaming chat, drag-and-drop files, clipboard image paste, Cmd+K command palette, in-app self-update, and an inline model picker.
›Enables connecting the desktop app to a remote Hermes gateway via OAuth or username/password, with per-profile remote host targeting and concurrent multi-profile sessions.
›Adds a full browser-based administration panel: Channels page (Telegram, Discord, Slack, etc.), MCP catalog with enable/disable toggles, credential management, webhook creation, memory configuration, and one-click Debug Share.
›Ships a complete Simplified Chinese (简体中文) translation across all desktop UI surfaces, switchable via Appearance settings (display.language).
›Adds /undo [N] command to retract the last N user turns across CLI, TUI, and messaging platforms (Telegram, Discord, etc.), with the last message prefilled for editing.

+7 moreshow less

›Adds --cli flag to hermes chat and a configurable default interface (cli or tui), plus a unified /model command and Sessions overlay in the TUI.
›Adds hermes portal as a human-readable alias for the Quick Setup flow via Nous Portal, getting new users from install to first message without docs.
›Adds NVIDIA/skills as a built-in trusted Skills Hub tap alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, and HuggingFace — CUDA-X, AIQ, cuOpt and other NVIDIA skills are one install away.
›Adds fuzzy search to the model picker across desktop, web dashboard, TUI, and CLI; model catalog now refreshes hourly; multi-endpoint providers grouped to reduce duplicates.
›Adds new models to the picker: deepseek-v4-flash, MiniMax-M3 (1M context), qwen3.7-plus.
›Adds environments: relevance gate for skills, keeping context-specific skills (kanban, docker/s6) out of the index unless explicitly requested.
›Enables pruning of unused built-in skills (not just agent-created ones) via the curator, with per-skill usage tracking.

└──▷ BREAKING ON UPGRADE

!The bundled skill set removes spotify, linear, kanban-codex-lane, debugging-hermes-tui-commands, and several empty category markers by default; setups relying on these skills being auto-loaded must install them explicitly via hermes skills install.
!Heavier/niche skills (dspy, subagent-driven-development, minecraft-modpack-server, pokemon-player, hermes-s6-container-supervision, and the Baoyu creative set) are no longer loaded by default and must be installed explicitly.
!Building the desktop app now requires Node ≥20.19 or ≥22.12.

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◆ Local LLM Runtimes

llama.cpp

b9543 NOTES

llama.cpp b9543 adds video support for Qwen3.5 via 'frame merge' for Qwen-VL-based models.

└──▷ GET THIS VERSION

$ git clone --branch b9543 https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp.git
# already have the repo? check out this version:
$ git checkout b9543

›Adds 'frame merge' multimodal video support for Qwen-VL-based models, enabling video input for Qwen3.5 via the mtmd layer.

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// END OF TRANSMISSION

The AI Toolchain · curated daily · June 6, 2026
Releases & features from the open-source and commercial AI tools that practitioners actually run.

The AI Toolchain — issue -074, June 6, 2026

Anthropic Claude Code

Nous Research Hermes

llama.cpp