v0.2.0 — Make Recursive yours
Recursive 0.2.0 is built around the way you want to work. Shape the workspace with plugins, create Bots for the roles you come back to, and give each job the right tools, model, and computer without rebuilding your setup every time.
Make Recursive feel like your workspace. Plugins can add tools, new places to work, settings, themes, and ways for your agents to connect with the rest of your day. Browse what is available, install what fits, and choose which parts appear in your sidebar and workspace. You can even switch icon and theme packs when you want the app to feel more like your own.
Build a team of Bots you can return to. Give each Bot a name and a focus, connect it to a project, and pick up the same home conversation whenever you need it. Its role, preferences, and memory stay with it, so a recurring teammate does not need to be reintroduced every time.
Give your Bots a computer when the work needs one. Connect a private cloud workspace, a local computer, or a dedicated browser, then choose which Bots can use it. Recursive keeps the computer visible in the workspace so you can follow along, check what happened, and keep control of shared access.
Developer preview: let Smart Router match the model to the job. Connect OpenRouter once, then Auto mode can weigh the kind of work, available providers, usage left, speed, and cost before choosing a model. Set whether you prefer savings, balance, or performance, and Recursive can recover through another suitable model when the first choice is unavailable.
Turn a plan into work you can start and follow. Tasks keep the plan, checklist, controls, and progress together. Start or stop the work from the task, watch each step settle, and open the resulting pull request without losing the thread from idea to review.
Put recurring work in the hands of the right Bot. Routines make scheduled and event-driven work easier to recognize by showing the Bots involved. New connection plugins can bring work in from more of the services your team already uses, while guided sign-in keeps setup approachable.
Also in this release:
- Plugin search in the command palette — find and open extensions without leaving the keyboard.
- Offline dictation on Mac — Moonshine transcribes prompts on your computer instead of sending audio to a transcription service.
- Inline desktop settings — settings open alongside your work with a clear path back to where you started.
- Session keyword search — find past sessions without waiting for every old conversation to load.
- Session recovery and auto-resume — interrupted work can return after a restart and continue from its saved objective.
- Bot commitments — due dates and attention counts keep long-running obligations visible.
- Working view — live activity is grouped so you can follow several sessions without mixing them into the conversation.
- Video artifacts in chat — recordings and validation clips appear in the conversation that produced them.
- Clearer access presets — Supervised, Assisted, and Full access make it easier to decide when the agent should ask.
- Terminal tab persistence — terminal tabs stay open like the rest of your workspace.
- Mobile polish — improved Bot creation, session details, navigation, and layering on smaller screens.
Technical release details
Recursive 0.2.0 expands the platform from session-oriented coding into durable, principal-owned automation. The release also moves the first-party product surface onto the same plugin contracts exposed to third-party extensions.
Machine-readable release contract
- The canonical release URL is
/releases/0.2.0. Its initial HTML contains the public release note plus a hidden, versioneddata-release-agent-notessection with these technical details, so agents can inspect the page without a client fetch or audience control. - Requests with
Accept: text/markdownreceive the generated Markdown mirror from the same canonical URL withVary: Accept, Accept-Encoding. - Stable discovery resources are the agent index, developer docs, Product API reference, OpenAPI document, MCP documentation, and MCP well-known document.
Bot and computer runtime
- Bots are durable principals with a home session, avatar, memory scope, default project, model profile, and policy. Child work remains regular sessions linked to the originating bot.
- Computers are principal-owned, multi-instance provider bindings. An exact
computer_idbinding wins over provider and default preferences; leases gate input when a computer is shared. - Provider plugins include E2B cloud sandboxes, local Mac control through Cua, and Chromium-local browser automation. Computer tabs expose screenshots, action state, and VP8 WebM evidence clips.
- Pending bots cannot turn. Home-session creation rolls back if the computer bind fails, preventing partially configured principals.
Plugin-native product surface
- Tasks, Terminal, Browser, Inbox, Marketplace, Plans, Coding, settings pages, detail routes, workspace tabs, and header actions now register through plugin manifests instead of shell-owned route tables.
- Plugin surface preferences control placement in the sidebar, settings, and detail routes. Installs support onboarding terminals, version history, rollback, and runtime reload.
- Entity tabs can address tasks, routines, plugins, pull requests, and other plugin-owned records as first-class workspace tabs.
- Installed plugins must ship runtime links for their
@recursive/*dependencies so boot-time sync can resolve package imports.
Agent transports and capability discovery
- Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and Grok run through the Agent Client Protocol host with a shared permission broker and session lifecycle.
- ACP sessions receive Recursive-owned
todo_write, plan, mode, anduser_askcapabilities. The platform state remains authoritative rather than the provider CLI's private todo or plan stores. - Session-bound MCP projects skills through
skills/listandskills/get. Deferred tools resolve throughworkspace_mcpafter catalog lookup, which keeps large tool schemas out of the initial context. - Adapter CLI updates run as background utility work with progress surfaced in the UI. Lightweight title, summary, memory-reconcile, and lane-PR jobs can use a dedicated utility model.
Durable work and orchestration
- Tasks own executable plans with start, stop, and live checklist progress. Plans v2 are durable plugin documents linked to their owning session and projected into chat as plan cards.
- Delegation policy can inherit, require a choice, or pin a model profile. The selected profile is enforced across MCP, sessions, and workflows.
- Bot commitments store obligations with due dates and attention counts. Live thinking and tool activity project into an open-by-default Working disclosure without conflating attention with liveness.
- Interrupted sessions recover on boot, and configurable auto-resume binds the saved objective to the correct session before creating a continuation turn.
- Workflow completion can steer or notify the originating session after asynchronous work finishes.
User-facing runtime changes
- Inline desktop settings use workspace navigation with breadcrumb history. Session drafts persist Agent, Plan, or Ask mode.
- Routines replace the Automations surface and add trigger connections plus managed channel authorization.
- Moonshine through sherpa-onnx replaces Whisper for packaged, offline dictation.
- Pull requests, streaming session search, terminal tab persistence, structured branch-switch prompts, inline video artifacts, and capture-produced validation artifacts are available as workspace surfaces.
Reliability and compatibility
- Permission presets map supervised, assisted, and full-access sessions to distinct cost and permission bundles.
- Transient provider failures retry before fallback. Scheduled wake handling tolerates laptop sleep, HTTP resume trusts saved provider session IDs, and MCP tool loops are bounded.
- Large relay JSON responses use gzip. Session lists use indexed totals and paginated refresh while preserving the open row.
- OpenCode effort and fast-mode options are discovered from provider catalogs when supported. YAML settings preserve values containing special characters.
Preview boundaries
Agent rooms, scoped approval rules, and attention-receipt projection are still in flight for 0.2.0 and are not part of the shipped capability contract yet.