Changelog

0.26.0 (2026-08-26)

This release closes the 0.26 beta cycle. Across five betas and a post-beta polish pass, NetClaw got faster with your permission, lighter on your token budget, and more dependable with MCP servers.

Less approval fatigue

Fresh sessions used to drown you in prompts. Now they land on a focused handful — approvals are reserved for genuinely risky actions, not routine setup and review.

• Fresh-session eval: prompt-equivalent events fell 32 → 25, and read/edit/web guardrails held at 15/15 (#1982).
• Agents stop retrying a scope after a denial, one approval covers an entire causal Bash diagnostic chain, and persistent seed grants batch into a single Ask (#1985, #1925, #1989).
• Agents declare project scope up front and keep it, instead of drifting to session scratch or fabricating phantom directories (#1870, #1921, #1990, #2008).
• Approval scope gaps closed: /dev/null, dotted paths, quoted free-text operands, trailing-slash globs (#1852, #1799, #1815, #1785).

More token efficiency

The agent reaches for the right tool, so it spends fewer calls — and fewer tokens — to get the same result. Proven by eval, not vibes.

• Tool calls cut by more than half on attachment tasks. Five fresh-session trials dropped from baseline 11 tool calls / 15 model requests to 5 tool calls / 10 model requests per task — a single attach_file call in every run, with no shell or file-mutation prelude (#2050).
• Prompt-equivalent events cut by a quarter in fresh sessions — 32 → 25, with read/edit/web guardrails held at 15/15 (#1982).
• Fewer tool calls per task, proven by eval. On the reference five-run task, behavior completion rose (3/5 → 5/5) while shell calls dropped 6 → 5, compound shell calls 1 → 0, and approval-equivalent events 1 → 0 (#1994).
• Structured tools picked in 25/25 trials. Recursive search, batch reads, JSON projection, and deferred discovery each chose the native structured tool over a shell fallback in every hosted trial (#2039, #2037).
• Native tool names can't leak into the shell — a known first-party tool name typed into shell_execute is caught before any grant, approval, or execution, and returns a typed correction (#2050).
• Progressive tool disclosure. Parent and subagent sessions each get a deterministic, role-scoped tool set, so a child only sees the surface it needs (#2021, #2022).
• Fewer tools by default. Bulk/ambiguous workspace tools were removed in favor of composed primitives; a fixed synthetic catalog produced just 3 parent tool definitions (~1 KB of schema) vs. 202 child definitions (~134 KB) — proof the parent surface stays lean (#2045, #2020, #2033, #2037).

MCP reliability, OAuth, and prompts

The largest theme this cycle. NetClaw leaned harder into Model Context Protocol — server prompts now shape how the agent works, OAuth survives restarts, and a long tail of reliability fixes make MCP dependable at scale.

• MCP server prompts are now invocable as skills — the prompts primitive plugs straight into NetClaw's skill system, so any MCP server can steer agent behavior right out of the box. netclaw skill load them like built-ins and netclaw skill list surfaces them alongside your own (#1813, #1891).
• OAuth refresh survives cold restarts — the SDK-resolved client identity is persisted, so token refresh still matches after a restart instead of falling back to interactive auth (#1970).
• Auth-loss explains itself — diagnostics report the missing/mismatched binding field, refresh-token state, and token expiry (#1969).
• Output no longer corrupted by redaction — legitimate credential-like payloads (e.g. presigned URLs) pass through trusted MCP output untouched; redaction stays on for shell, file, web, and background output (#1992).
• Sane server-level defaults — new tools inherit the server approval default instead of silently hiding (#1978).
• Accurate connection and outcome health — tool-call exceptions record as failed outcomes (#2055), reconnects fire only on real transport/session failures (#2056), dead OAuth connections stop reporting "Connected forever" (#1841), and non-OAuth 401/403 surface as their true status (#1908).
• Secrets scrubbed — token and client-registration error bodies can no longer leak the client secret into daemon logs (#1976).

Proven, not promised

Approval and tool-guidance changes now ship with executable behavioral evidence.

• Eval harness separates stdout from stderr so diagnostics can't fake JSON output (#1896).
• Live shell-approval corpora and before/after fresh-session evals anchor each claim (#1930, #1819, #1982).
• A post-merge binary-swap harvest records real-world tool selection to catch rollout drift (#2039, #2040).

Always-on reminders, in your timezone

• Timezone-aware cron via the Vixie CRON_TZ= prefix — DST-correct schedules in any IANA zone (#1789).
• Reminders no longer skipped on execution capacity; failed one-shots are retained and duplicate acks are idempotent (#1839, #1812, #1955).
• Scheduling failures surface loudly with a Critical alert and channel notice instead of silently staying enabled (#1886).

Quieter channels

• Thread replies become mention-gated with automatic history backfill — less noise, right context (#1783).
• SlackNet 0.17.11 and faster Mattermost startup (no more WebSocket connect race) (#1986).

First-class Windows

• Native PowerShell on Windows with a 5.1 fallback for script hosts, instead of emulation.
• Self-update no longer crashes on Windows after success; a failed binary swap rolls back so installs never brick (#1924).

Under the hood

• Netclaw.Channels — duplicated channel helpers consolidated into one shared library (#2002, #2005).
• Webhook route mutation moved to a daemon actor as the single authority (#2011).
• JSON pointer token buffers reused for a hot-path allocation win (#2041).
• Persistent-seed approval grants batch into one Ask per case (#1989).
• CI deflaked: deterministic race-condition fixes, raised TestKit expect default, shared-timeout sizing, and fetched-content filename collision proofing (#2001, #2014, #2019, #2018).

Security posture

• Fail-closed tool and shell policy stays the default; approval scope gaps closed across the cycle.
• SSH.NET pinned to 2026.0.0 to resolve CVE-2026-48798 in a test-only transitive dependency (#1909).

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