1.26287 — 14 October 2026

Eight days after 1.26279. Until now, putting your gezellen to work on your own files meant setting up a project and deciding what to ask. Gezellen (one is a gezel) are the named AI craftspeople on your crew. Now you can hand them a folder, such as your Pictures, your Documents or a codebase. They read it, never change it, and work on it overnight. In the morning you find a short report, albums of your recent photos, and fixes for you to approve.

This release also rebuilds your first few minutes with gezel around one conversation with the Meester, the crew's guildmaster and the first gezel you meet. And in Word, Excel and PowerPoint, the Gezel pane is now a chat about the document you have open.

If you read only one thing: choose File → Add Folder…, and see what your crew makes of your Pictures folder by tomorrow morning.

Your first few minutes

Starting gezel for the first time used to open on a setup page. It asked about a security level, names and figures, social mode, a relevance check and optional downloads, all before you had said a word. Now the Meester introduces themselves and asks for one thing: "Before we start, I need my tools: an AI that runs privately on this computer." One key fetches it and shows its size and roughly how long it will take. Below it are Use one already on this computer and Connect a cloud account instead. Everything else starts on its default. One line says what that means, with Change what I'm allowed to do if you want something else.

The model offered is one that will start. Gezel now picks it by the memory free right now, not by the size of the computer, and ranks the most heavily compressed models lower. Before, a laptop with a 12 GB graphics card could be offered a model that was then refused on its first message. On Windows and Linux, the welcome also waits for the engine that runs the model ("Setting up my workbench"), so your first message no longer fails with "the engine is downloading". Until a model is ready, the chat box says "name can start talking once a model is downloaded."
Something to start with. An empty Meester chat offers four ways to start, such as Plan a trip, Practice a language or Make sense of a spreadsheet, led by what you said you want help with. Each fills in a sentence for you to change before you send it, such as "Plan a trip to Lisbon next spring for the four of us, about a week."
Goals go to the right kind of project. Some kinds of project come ready-made, with their own crew and board. A goal that clearly names one, such as a trip or learning a language, now starts a Trip Planner or a Language Trainer. Before, a trip could get a developer writing a web page. The task keeps your own sentence rather than the Meester's longer version of it. Thread titles keep it too: "Plan a trip to Lisbon next spring for the four of us", not "Plan trip Lisbon next spring four week".
"What would you like help with?" The welcome asks once, with choices such as Writing software, Home and family and Games and play. Whatever you pick comes first in the starting suggestions, Make something on Home, a new For you shelf in New Task, New Project and suggested knowledge catalogs. Nothing is ever hidden because of it. Change your answer in Settings → General → What you use gezel for.
Your crew is introduced. When work brings gezellen in, the thread shows who joined: their portrait, their role in plain words (such as "Reisleider — trip planner"), the step they start with, and Say hello. Before, they joined without a word. The welcome also names the two already at work: the Klerk, who handles titles and summaries, and the Boekwachter, who keeps track of your files.
A new install starts quietly. For the first 30 minutes, and until a model can answer, gezel does no indexing in the background. Folders you add yourself are still indexed at once. The scheduled Night Shift waits the same way.
The optional media models for pictures and speech are no longer offered during setup. They are in Settings → Artificial Intelligence → Media models, which offers only the ones this computer can run.

Hand your crew a folder

There are three ways in. One is Add Folder… in the File menu (Cmd/Ctrl+Shift+O). Another is the Existing Folder choice under New Project. The third is the Meester: once your first piece of work is finished, they ask at the end of your conversation, "Want me to look after a folder of yours too? I'll only read it." Pictures, Documents and any code folders gezel finds are listed there, and nothing is ticked for you. The question stays until you add a folder or choose Skip for now.

Before anything is added, you see what the folder holds, such as "12,480 photos · 1,204 only in the cloud", and what your crew will do with it tonight.

Read-only, always. Gezel reads the folder and builds a search index of it. It never changes, moves or deletes a file unless you ask and approve. That includes git's own housekeeping files in a code folder. Everything gezel learns about the folder, such as its index, photo descriptions and summaries, lives in gezel's own folder, not yours. Earlier versions kept a project's search index in a .gezel folder inside your folder. It is moved out the first time gezel starts, not rebuilt, so nothing is read again.
Files that live only in the cloud stay there. With iCloud's Optimize Storage or OneDrive's Files On-Demand, files that are not on this computer are listed by name and date, and never downloaded. A Photos library belongs to the Photos app, so gezel leaves it alone.
A crew comes with it. Every folder gets a Boekwachter, the crew member who reads a folder, describes it and files issues about it. A code folder also gets a Builder, which lets your crew draft fixes overnight. A photo folder gets a Curator, a new role that looks after your photos (The Curator). They are added once, when you add the folder. If you take one off, they stay off.
The folder's Overview gives you a first look. For example: "12,480 photos from 2009 to 2026 · about 3,100 look like duplicates · 840 screenshots", and how long the first pass will take, when that is an hour or more. A file you open in the folder shows an About this file line with the Boekwachter's one-line summary.
Changes arrive as proposals. When your crew wants to change something, say a fix for a problem in your code, you get a change proposal to read and apply yourself. Proposals can now also move and copy files and create folders. Each of these is its own row, applied after the edits and never over an existing file. A problem the Boekwachter found is marked fixed only when you apply its fix, and opens again if you dismiss the proposal.

Folders you add from the File menu or New Project are worked on overnight by default, during the Night Shift, the work your crew does while you sleep. A code folder gets reviews of its structure, dependencies, security and tests, plus fixes drafted for what they find. Fixes are now drafted only for code folders. A photo folder gets albums. Overnight work is switched on only for gezellen that run on a model on this computer. Nothing that would send your files to a cloud model is switched on for you. To stop overnight work on a folder, turn off Work on this folder overnight on its Overview. The folder stays searchable. See Adding folders.

Mornings: what your crew did overnight

When your crew worked overnight, Home opens on its Night shift tab. It leads with what needs a decision: change proposals, then the night's main report, shown in full. Then it shows what finished, new albums and On this day for your photo folders, and what is already queued for tonight. The morning card stays until you press Dismiss; after that, the tab keeps a summary of the night for about half a day.

A quiet night stays quiet. A night when the computer was asleep, gezel was not running or there was nothing to do leaves no card and no notification. When work was held back for a reason you can fix (the computer was on battery, or your cloud quota was being saved), the card says so once and offers the fix. A night's reports and finished work stay on their card until you dismiss it; a newer card replaces an older one only when it shows the same things again.
Each folder leaves a short report, made without a model, so it costs nothing. Photos: recent outings, photos from this day in earlier years, and exact duplicates. Documents: what was added or changed. Code: the files that change often and carry problems, the files everything else depends on, and open issues by severity. On the first morning of a new week, Your crew's week recaps every night.
Queue something for tonight. While the Night Shift is on, a one-time craftbook (a written recipe of steps a crew follows) has a Tonight choice, in the chat's task bar and in the New Task dialog, so it runs during the Night Shift instead of now. In the New Task dialog, pressing Enter always starts it now. In the chat's task bar, Tonight is a switch: while it is on, sending queues the task for tonight.
New in Settings → General → Night Shift: Start Gezel when I log in, without opening a window keeps gezel in the tray, or the menu bar on a Mac, from the moment you log in. It is available in the installed app only. Pause night work while this computer runs on battery is on by default: unplug and the shift stops, plug in and it continues. When the Meester asks about folders, answering Yes to "Let your crew work while you sleep?" turns both on, along with the Night Shift itself and keeping the computer awake while it runs. Nothing is answered for you: a folder added there gets overnight work only after a Yes.
One Mac setting is gone. Wake this machine when the window opens never worked, because macOS lets only administrators schedule a wake. Settings now says so. Leave the Mac plugged in and awake for the night.
The Default project rests at night. Default is where chats and tasks land when you have not picked a project. It no longer gets overnight work. The Meester's nightly review now looks only at projects that have overnight work on.
Stalled fix runs are cleared the next night. A fix run left paused, or waiting on a question nobody was awake to answer, used to hold on to its problems for good. It is now cancelled the following night so the crew can try those problems again, and its question is removed from your list.

Word, Excel and PowerPoint: a chat about your document

The Gezel pane in Word, Excel and PowerPoint used to hold the whole project: its tabs, its tasks and every gezel's threads. The gezel in it often did not know which document you meant. Ask it to "add some content" to an empty Word document and it could ask which file. Now the pane is one conversation about the document in front of you, with the document's name at the top.

The gezel sees what you have selected. Every message you send tells the gezel what is selected, or that nothing is, or that the document is empty. With edits allowed, "add", "write" or "change" goes in at the cursor without asking where. With edits off, the text comes back in the reply, with a reminder that you can allow edits in the pane.
It keeps to the document. The gezel gets the document's own tools plus search, memory and web lookups, and other files in the project are no longer pulled into the conversation. Your shared library, memories and knowledge catalogs still count. With less to read before it answers, it starts sooner.
Only this document's threads are listed, and they are still there after a Save As. Show project opens the full project when you want it, with a key to come back.
A writer answers by default. The pane picks a writer from the crew, then the project's lead, then the Meester. The Boekwachter, Klerk and Keurmeester, who work in the background, are no longer picked for you and are hidden from Talk to.
Setup on Windows says what to do. Office shows Gezel's button on the Home tab only after you have opened Gezel once from Add-ins → Developer Add-ins. The setup steps now say so on Windows, as they already did on a Mac.
LibreOffice on Windows no longer refuses to install its extension with "Close LibreOffice first" when no LibreOffice window is open. Gezel used to leave a hidden copy of LibreOffice running each time it checked the version.
Settings → Connected Apps has a tab for each app: Overview, Codex, VS Code, OpenCode, pi, Office, LibreOffice and Ollama. A tab whose setup needs you shows a dot, and requests waiting for your approval stay above the tabs.

See Connected apps.

A calmer workshop

Most screens got quieter in this release, so that what you need stands out.

"Task speed" is now Crew activity. The control in the title bar opens a menu headed "How much your gezellen do on their own", with four keys: Off, Chat only, Tasks + chat and Proactive. These were called "Reactive only" and "Tasks + Reactive" before. Under them, one line says what the Night Shift is doing, such as when it ends or what it finished last night, and one key starts or stops it. Your setting is unchanged.
Chats show less machinery. The list of steps, the model's thinking and its attempted tool calls fold behind Details on each reply. While a gezel works without saying anything, a hammer with a count shows that it is busy, not stuck. In the Meester's conversation on Home, a helper's whole transcript folds into one line, such as "Mira is working…". Night Shift and scheduled runs no longer appear in that conversation at all.
Finished work arrives as a card: "Name made this for you". The card shows the document's title and opening lines, with Open, Make changes and Show in folder. When the result is a project's board, such as a trip plan, the card opens the project's Output page instead.
A task's page lists everything it made, with Other files under the main result, and it updates as steps finish. Before, it could stay stuck on the first step.
File names in a question are links. When a gezel asks you about a file, you can open it straight from the question, in Activity, on Home or in the project.
A gezel's model and tuning have their own Settings tab on the gezel's page: model, reasoning effort, context, sources, and the sandbox or access choices for Copilot and Codex. Each setting describes itself in full, and a save that fails now says so. The gezel's header shows its model only when it differs from your default.
Project controls. A project's status and its Can edit setting moved into More project controls, which also has Stop workspace edits. A read-only project still says so in the bar.
Home is a row of tabs over the Meester chat: the greeting with the Meester's status report, Night shift, Make something and Handboek. Make something offers ready-made craftbooks, such as a research report, a Word document, a slide deck, a PDF report, a website or an animated slideshow, with See all for the rest. It puts what you said you want help with first, and leaves out what this computer cannot run. The greeting opens when you start gezel until you put it away; after that it stays behind its tab until you open it again. It also stays out of the way when your last message failed or a reply came in while you were away. To put it away, click the chat, press Escape, or click the open tab again.
A new look. The app has a new icon, a cream workbench and vise on deep green, and redrawn tray and menu-bar icons. The green of the title bar is darker so its small labels are easier to read, and gray text has more contrast.
Easier with a keyboard or a screen reader. Every row of choice keys moves with the arrow keys, Home and End. Text boxes and settings fields have names a screen reader can read out. Reduced motion stops the pulsing dots.
In everything you read, the plural of gezel is now gezellen, as in Dutch.

Fewer "not enough memory" dead ends

When a model on your computer was refused for lack of memory, the message offered Retry, which failed the same way every time. Now:

Retry appears only when the model would start. Gezel checks again when you come back to the window. If another model already on this computer would start, Use name instead makes it your default and sends your message again.
The list of local models agrees with that check. A model that would be refused right now is marked won't start right now, instead of being called a good match for this machine.
Large models on a graphics card are refused less often. A model bigger than the card used to be charged for the whole card, so anything else using the card made it fail. Gezel now plans against the card's free memory and checks only the part it puts there.
Image and video models are sized from their files. Each one shows the memory it needs, such as needs ~9 GB graphics memory. A model too large for this computer is hidden and cannot be downloaded. Show all models lists it anyway, marked Too large. A model that might not fit asks before it downloads.
Installing an engine shows each stage: downloading, unpacking and checking. Unpacking the 641 MB Windows graphics-card engine no longer freezes the window for about 18 seconds.

Photos, video and sound, found by what is in them

Finding a photo used to mean remembering its name or folder. Now the search box finds photos by what they show, such as "dog on the beach" or "birthday cake". It also finds the moment in a video or recording where something happens. Results say Photo, Video · 1:20–1:50 or Sound, photos show a thumbnail, and opening a video or recording plays it from the moment that matched. Your gezellen can search your photos the same way.

This replaces the earlier image search with one model, Google's EmbeddingGemma 2, that understands photos, video and sound together. It reads photos only while your computer is idle or during the Night Shift, never during a chat. Photos you had already indexed are read again with the new model the same way.

It is on by default, and it downloads about 540 MB the first time gezel starts, if your security settings allow gezel to use the network. If they don't, photos are found by name and description as before.
Video and sound need two more things. Sound support is about 340 MB more. It downloads when gezel first indexes a video or recording, or when you press Download sound support now. You also need ffmpeg, which gezel does not include. Install it from ffmpeg.org, or with Homebrew on a Mac, then press Check for ffmpeg again. Photos work without either.
Settings → Image recognition → Search photos, video and sound turns it off, and Photo detail chooses how closely each photo is read: Quick, Balanced, Detailed (the default) or Finest. At Detailed, a recent Mac reads about one photo every two seconds. Changing the level reads every photo again in the background.
More kinds of photo. On a Mac, HEIC photos from iPhones are read. On every computer, camera RAW files (DNG, CR2, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2) are read too. For each photo, gezel records the date and the camera and lens it was taken with.
Albums. Overnight, the Curator turns each recent outing into an album: a slideshow of the frames that tell the day, in order and captioned, with gentle motion between them. Open one from the folder's Overview or Home's Night shift tab to play it, edit it, or export it as a video. An album keeps its own smaller copies of the photos, with where they were taken removed. Copy to a folder… gathers the full-size originals in one place and never replaces a file.
Where a photo was taken stays private. Gezel's photo search and photo tools never tell a gezel using a cloud model, and reports and albums never mention it. A picture you attach to a message yourself is sent as it is.

Two new image models

Gezel can make pictures on your own computer, and two new models are in Settings → Image generation. Both are open-licensed and allow commercial use, both make pictures from a description (neither edits a picture you already have), and both start at 1024 by 1024 pixels.

Ming Image 0.1 Design makes posters, infographics, app mockups and other designs that need readable text. It is a workstation model, about 49 GB to download. A 1024-pixel poster took five to seven minutes on a Mac with 128 GB of memory.
Iris 3B makes photographs, illustrations and artwork at about one megapixel. It is about 14.5 GB to download. By default it takes 100 steps per picture, choosing detail over speed. A quicker 20-step test took about three minutes on the same Mac, so expect the default to take several times longer.

Each shows the memory it needs beside its download, and is hidden on a computer that cannot run it. They need this release's updated image engine, so earlier versions of gezel do not list them.

Gezellen remember you

Telling one gezel your name, your job or that you prefer metric used to stay with that gezel. Now there is one shared set of notes about you, read by every gezel. It is in Settings → About You, listed by day. Correct or remove anything there, and gezellen read the new version from their next message. It starts empty: notes your gezellen made before this release stay in their own memories.

A gezel's Memories tab can be edited, both its daily notes and its lessons. Lines you put under a ## Pinned heading in lessons are kept word for word when the gezel rewrites its lessons.
Gezellen remember corrections. A mistake and its fix are saved as a correction. When a message repeats a mistake you have made before, the gezel sees that note first. The Language Trainer below uses this to keep working on what you get wrong.
Notes about you show up in search, labeled "Memory · About you".

See Memory, documents, and the shared library.

Social mode is a new switch in Settings → General. With it on, your gezellen talk in their own character, you can watch them grow, and opening a chat shows what they have waiting for you. With it off, they work in a plain, even voice. It is off by default on the desktop.

If you use the desktop, this changes what you see. The Growth tab, level badges, "I just reached level 3!" in chat and level-up notifications used to be always on. Now they show only with social mode on. Your gezellen keep earning experience either way, so turning it on brings everything back where it was.

Every gezel has a character: a temperament (warm, calm, lively, precise, wry or patient), one of twelve quirks, a style (plain, playful or formal) and how much small talk they make, from Quiet to Talkative. Existing gezellen have been given one. With social mode on, change it on the gezel's Appearance tab, which shows the exact lines the gezel reads about itself. Character decides how a gezel talks, not what it does, and never makes it skip a step.
Growth counts more of what a gezel learns: corrections it takes on board and worked examples now earn experience. Chatting more still earns nothing.
"What's waiting." Opening a gezel's chat, or a Just Chat project, shows at most one thing: a question it asked that you haven't answered, or work it finished in the last three days, with Open. If nothing is waiting, there is no card. Dismiss one and it stays gone.

See Social mode.

New craftbooks, games and lessons

Four new craftbooks to try on your own files, each of which reads and never changes what you give it. Explain a code folder gives a plain-language tour: what the code does, how it is organized, how to run it, and the three files to read first. Review a code folder lists each real problem with its file and line, how serious it is and a suggested fix, plus what the code does well. Make sense of a spreadsheet reports what a CSV or Excel file holds and what stands out, quoting every number from the file. Tidy up a spreadsheet cleans a CSV file into a new copy, with a list of every change and anything it could not fix. It never guesses a missing value.

Some kinds of project come with their own crew, tools and an Output tab you can play or practice in. Several got bigger:

Word Clues is a new word game. Sixteen words are on the board: six are yours, nine are bystanders, and one is the trap. Two new gezellen take turns giving clues, the lively Woordsmid and the careful Puzzelaar.
Language Trainer has role-play scenes on its Output tab, such as a café, a market, a pharmacy, lost luggage and a doctor's visit, over three levels. The tutor's corrections appear under each reply and come back as review cards after a day, three days and a week. The tab shows your level, your day streak and the reviews that are due.
Trip Planner asks "Who's going?" and can plan Day 1, Day 2 and so on before you know the dates. Day plans are written as plain sentences. The Output tab shows who is going and dates such as "Tue 3 Dec", or "Leaving next spring" when there is no exact date yet.
Flashcards can Make cards from notes: paste your notes and get four to eight cards.
Fitness Coach has Log a session on its Output tab and a Weekly recap: the numbers come from your log, and the coach adds one suggestion. It asks before scheduling a Sunday recap.
Checkers, Chess and Go have a new table-talk style, In-character, now the default, which follows your gezel's character. Moves are more reliable on small models.
Output pages follow your light or dark theme.

These apply to projects you start from now on. Projects you already have keep the version they were created with.

Notifications only when something happened

Gezel now notifies you only when something actually happened: a gezel asked you a question, work you asked for is finished, your crew worked overnight, a gezel reached a new level (with social mode on), or a project worked out that something is due. Flashcards and the Language Trainer, for example, remind you when reviews come up. Gezel never notifies you just because time passed.

Three a day at most, by default. Choose Off, 1, 3, 5 or 10 in Settings → General → Notifications. Things that happen together arrive as one notification, such as "3 things are waiting". Anything over the limit is still waiting in Activity and in its chat.
Nothing while you are looking. While a gezel window has focus, you get no notifications.
They arrive with the window closed. The app now sends them itself, so they reach you as long as gezel is running, including from the tray.

See Notifications.

Scripts on Windows run in a sandbox

On a Mac, a script a gezel writes has always run inside a sandbox the operating system enforces. Windows had none, so gezel refused to run many of those scripts there, and at the default Lockdown level the tools for writing and running them were missing. Now Windows has one too: scripts run inside Microsoft's process container (MXC), a sandbox built into recent Windows 11.

Scripts that were refused now run. That includes scripts a gezel writes and runs for you, craftbook steps that check their work with a script, and project scripts you or a gezel changed.
A script reaches only its project's folder and its own scratch space. It cannot read the rest of your disk, reach the internet or touch the clipboard. When a gezel needs the web, it uses its web tools, which your security settings control and History records.
One change if you use Free. On Windows these scripts used to get ordinary network access when External Services was on. Now they always run offline, as they do on a Mac.
Reading documents moves inside too. Gezel reads Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in a separate process. On Windows, that process now runs in the sandbox as well.
It costs a moment. A script starts about a twentieth of a second later.
Settings → Security & Compliance has a Windows sandbox line that says whether it is active on your PC, and why not when it isn't. A switch turns it off. It needs Windows 11 24H2 or later with recent updates. Where your Windows cannot run it, gezel works exactly as before.
The installed app includes Microsoft's signed launcher. If you installed gezel with npm, it downloads the launcher (about 38 MB) the first time it starts on Windows, if your security settings allow gezel to use the network.

See The security model.

Security

None of these changes anything you do.

A gezel using git can no longer write files, read files outside the project, or run programs your git settings name. Gezellen get a short list of git commands, each with its own allowed options.
A browser script a gezel wants to run needs your approval of that exact script. Changing the script, or anything it loads, asks again. The script never gets gezel's own credentials, and it is unavailable while External Services is off.
A project's own settings can no longer change how packages are installed. Installs ignore install-time plugins and hook files a project carries, never switch to a different installer version the project asks for, and always download from the public registry, whatever a planted .npmrc says.
Photo search and photo tools never tell a cloud model where a photo was taken. A picture you attach to a message yourself is sent as it is, so remove its location first if that matters.
The Windows installer can no longer be redirected. Before it sets permissions on gezel's data folders, it checks every link in them. Links that stay inside, such as those Python tools create, are kept. A link that points somewhere else on the disk is removed from gezel's private folder; in the folder every account shares, it stops the background service setup instead. Either way, permissions never change wherever such a link leads.
Libraries gezel ships with were updated to close eight high-severity security advisories. Axios moves to 1.20.0 and the MCP SDK to 1.31.0.

Smaller things

Take a photo from the chat box. A camera key appears next to the picture key when a camera is attached. On the desktop it opens a viewfinder, with a camera picker if you have more than one. The photo is shrunk to 2048 pixels before it joins your message, and on the desktop it carries no location or camera details.
Switching local models waits instead of failing. When a chat needs a different model on this computer and there is not enough memory for both, it used to wait 30 seconds for the busy model and then fail. Now it says "Waiting for name to finish before switching models" and switches as soon as that work is done. Stop ends the wait.
A failed reply is shown once. It used to appear in the chat box as well as in the conversation, so the same sentence could be on screen three times. When the fix is to install or choose a model, the message now has a Set up a model or Choose a model button that takes you there.
Notes that a long conversation was shortened to fit the model's memory no longer carry a warning sign, because nothing went wrong.
The window recovers from a crash. If the window's contents crashed, for example after a long night of live updates, the window stayed blank until you quit gezel. It now reloads itself, up to three times in ten minutes.
"Waiting on you" opens Activity in the right place. On Home and beside a project in the sidebar, the counts open Activity at Needs you or Ready, rather than at the top.
A new local chat model, Underdog Saluki 1.0, is in Settings → Artificial Intelligence. It is Conway Research's compact edition of Qwen 3.8 27B, a 7.9 GB download tuned for using tools.
LFM2.5 24B gets more room to think. This model always reasons before it acts, and while writing a file it was cut off after 1,024 characters of reasoning. It now gets three times as much.
Fewer false alarms when a gezel writes facts. The check that stops a gezel from writing a name, date or number no source shows no longer trips on the gezel's own name, the project's name, bold headings or words in capitals.
Craftbook steps told to write a file can write it. Some steps described a file to write in plain words, and were left without a tool that could write it, so they stalled.
Knowledge catalogs open in Knowledge. The + beside the catalog picker and Browse knowledge catalogs open a dialog in place, instead of sending you to Settings. Catalogs now have artwork.
OpenAI and Anthropic Claude with an API key are always listed under Settings → Artificial Intelligence. Before, they were hidden until set up. With a key, Claude now starts on Claude Opus 5.5 and OpenAI on GPT-6.1 Sol. Each model offers the reasoning efforts it supports, including xhigh and max on the newer Claude models. A saved effort that a model does not support moves to the nearest one it does.
Claude Code and Codex. Claude Code offers every reasoning effort for each of its models, Haiku included, and can now use toolsets that run as a web service, such as DocBlocks. Codex adds GPT-6.1 Sol, now its default, and GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna. When either cannot reach a tool server it now says so, and Codex tries again when its connection to gezel's tools fails. Files they read and write with their own tools now count toward a craftbook step's checks. Before, those steps could never pass.
Model downloads keep going when you leave the page. Speech, voice and image-recognition models now download in the background service. A second click joins the running download, and Cancel really stops it.
Local models are faster on a graphics card. When a model fits entirely on the GPU, llama.cpp now uses at most four processor threads instead of all of them. On a DGX Spark, a small Gemma model went from 72 to about 120 tokens a second. A thread count you set yourself still wins.
A busy index no longer holds things up. Gezel used to stall for up to five seconds when its search index was busy, and could lose the Boekwachter's file summaries. It now waits its turn and retries.
History search waits until you stop typing, and no longer shows results from an earlier search.
Spelling and grammar checking no longer turns itself back on when you change an unrelated setting.
Restarting gezel no longer crashes. Restarting the service, for example from Settings, could end in a crash report. It now stops its model workers cleanly first.
Tasks no longer disappear. A task gezel could not read back used to be created and then vanish. It is now refused when you create it, with the reason.
New projects start reliably. Starting a ready-made kind of project could fail with "gezel … already exists" when a randomly chosen crew name was taken, and a new project could be labeled "Social Media" by mistake.
Errors from OpenAI now show, instead of arriving as an empty answer.
Mac ._ files are no longer indexed. These hidden companion files failed to index and were tried again every night.
On Linux, the packages now list the system libraries gezel needs, so a system too old to run it, such as Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12 or Fedora 39, refuses the install instead of gezel failing when it starts. Installing under WSL, or in a container without systemd, no longer leaves the package half set up.
Dependencies: @bendyline/gilde 0.2.0 and the Squisq document editor 2.11.25. The native engines move to 0.1.49, which updates the image engine (stable-diffusion.cpp master-951) for the new image models.

In the terminal

If you use the gezel command (The gezel command line):

gezel <craftbook> is short for gezel do <craftbook>. Built-in commands always win, so a typo still says the command is unknown.
gezel do keeps your request. Words without a key= used to fill the first parameter, usually the working folder. So gezel do summarize-long "Summarize notes.txt" named a folder after the sentence and lost the request. Words now fill only required settings with no default, and the rest becomes the request. key=value still sets anything.
gezel do checks setup before it starts. If a craftbook needs External Services, web search or a model you haven't downloaded, a terminal asks yes or no for each, and a script stops before starting with the command that fixes it.
gezel run - reads the prompt from standard input.
gezel start --port and --web reuse a running service that already does that. --restart replaces one that doesn't.
Catalogs can include video and sound. gezel knowledge build bundles MP4, MOV, WebM, MP3, M4A, WAV, FLAC and similar files, and with the embeddinggemma-2-512@1 profile and ffmpeg, they are searchable by what is in them. catalog.json can credit each file, and --skip-images now skips video and sound too. Catalogs with media use format 0.8, which older gezel releases cannot open. Other catalogs are still written as 0.7. See Working with knowledge catalogs.

For developers

New package: @bendyline/gezel-inference. Gezel's on-device runtime is now its own npm package. An app that hosts gezel in-process with host: { inferenceOnly: true } installs it in place of the whole service, and gezeld serves the same restricted host in child mode. It serves only on-device models; a cloud model is refused with 403 provider_not_allowed.
App SDK. streamText takes temperature, reasoningEffort, knowledge and responseFormat, emits progress events, and reports model, usage and appliedMaxTokens on done. New: withKnowledgeContext, connectDesktopEmbedding, and a knowledge-only grant (knowledge: true). registerAppTools takes a subject naming the document your app is about, which makes its threads conversations about that document, the way the Office pane works. DocBlocks: text AI with gezel walks through a real integration.
OpenAI-compatible API. stream_options.include_progress adds gezel_progress events. On /v1/embeddings, model: "gezel:embeddings" runs the on-device text embedder. Apple Foundation Models now honors a response_format JSON Schema through Apple's guided generation, and a reply cut at Apple's 1,024-token limit reports finish_reason: "length" with gezel_max_tokens. Bundled catalogs such as the Handboek are no longer offered to connected apps.
Scripts. A reminders capability: gezel.reminder.set({ at, title, body }) and clear(), at most 30 days ahead, one per project. See Writing scripts.
MCP tools. New copy_path, list_photos and photo_groups (locations only for the person's app and on-device models). save_memory and list_memories take a user scope.
HTTP. /api/reminders, /api/media-search (with install and ffmpeg re-check), project albums, index/thumb, overview, file-summary and night-work routes, PUT /api/memory/lessons (first-party only), and DELETE routes that cancel chat, speech and voice model downloads. New fit checks: GET /api/sessions/:id/model-fit, /api/system/models-fit-now and /api/{image,video}-gen/models/fit. Sessions and project timelines filter by ?subject=.
gezk 0.8 adds media assets and per-asset attribution, with JSON Schemas under packages/gezk/schemas/0.8/. The global CLI now needs @huggingface/transformers 4.3.1 or later. onnxruntime moves to 1.30.0.
Gilde 0.2 adds craftbook samples, interests on craftbooks and project types, and per-file tensors facts on image and video models, which gezel uses to work out how much memory they need. minRamGB and minVramGB are no longer required.
Image model catalog entries can ship a tokenizer file, passed to the image engine as --tokenizer. Ming Image is the first to need one.
Windows sandbox. /api/health reports scriptSandbox (its state, the reason when it is unavailable, and the isolation tier). GEZEL_MXC=off turns it off for one service, and GEZEL_MXC_EXEC points at a launcher of your own. Inside the sandbox, a script talks to gezel over standard input and output instead of a fourth pipe. The SDK handles this, so scripts need no change.

Things to see and do after update

Add a folder with File → Add Folder…, and check the Night shift tab on Home tomorrow. If you use Word, Excel or PowerPoint, open the Gezel pane on a document and ask for a change. Tell gezel what you want help with in Settings → General → What you use gezel for, and Make something on Home will lead with it. If your computer has a lot of memory, try Ming Image or Iris in Settings → Image generation. On the desktop, if you liked watching your gezellen level up, turn on Social mode in Settings → General, and set how many Notifications a day you want just below it. To search video and sound as well as photos, install ffmpeg and look at Settings → Image recognition. On Windows, open Settings → Security & Compliance to see whether the Windows sandbox is active on your PC.