AskCodi comes to Windows — and the app is free to use
The biggest release yet: AskCodi Desktop launches on Windows, the app is now free to use with no sign-in gate, and the whole workspace has been rebuilt around a manager shell — the app opens straight to your work, conversations read like a team channel with threads, and you can talk to an engineer directly from its task.
- Windows launch: AskCodi Desktop now ships for Windows x64 — installer and portable builds, with auto-updates. (Builds are unsigned for now, so Windows SmartScreen asks once on first install: More info → Run anyway.)
- Free to use: the app opens with no sign-in and no plan. Signing in with AskCodi exists for one reason — connecting the AskCodi gateway as a model source with its token balance.
- The manager shell: the app opens straight to the product. One sidebar answers everything — your private 1:1 with Codi, Needs you (the only interrupt), project channels, Running (the whole fleet, including your own terminal sessions), Work (the cross-project ledger), and History.
- Channels read like a team chat: your asks are the channel; every reply lands in that message's thread with participants, reply count, and last-reply time on the ask itself. Day dividers, member grammar, and working signals included.
- Talk to the engineer from its task: open any task from Work and type — your message goes straight to that engineer in its own worktree, no Codi turn spent on a one-line nudge. Runs and reviews still flow through Codi.
- Pick your harness once: onboarding is three steps — the CLI that types (Claude Code or Codex), the accounts that pay (logins, API keys, or AskCodi credits), and Codi's own model — with a live model catalog that knows what every connected source can serve.
- Sign in with just a gateway key: paste an AskCodi API key and it is validated for real, persisted, and counted as a connected source — no browser round-trip required.
- A naming counts as a tag: with one project, an untagged ask in the 1:1 resolves to it automatically — the 'Tag a project first' refusal only remains where scope is genuinely ambiguous.
- One answer, one 'Read more': an engineer's continued runs used to render as a stack of clamped fragments; a task's reply stream now folds as a single block with a single Read more.
- Uninstalling on Windows now offers to delete your local data (chats, projects, settings) — and defaults to keeping it, so updates and reinstalls never wipe anything.
- Switching Codi's harness carries its model along instead of dead-ending, and every model picker orders newest first from the live catalog.
- Open-source groundwork: the app is now Apache-2.0 licensed under the hood, with hardened OAuth, stricter renderer permissions, and a 40,000-line dead-code cleanup.
- Orientation with only an AskCodi account connected could show 'thinking' for a few seconds and then go silent forever; the engine path now fails loudly and retries cleanly, and the whole class of malformed streaming tool-calls is gone.
- The 'New Project' dialog (and every popup) now renders in the app's own theme — no more light-on-dark or black-on-black portals, on Windows or Mac.
- Windows: the bundled Claude and Codex CLIs are found correctly (.exe, no executable-bit assumption), window controls are present, and the sign-in artwork renders.
- A turn that ends mid-tool-call is now recorded as the failure it is — never as a silent success that leaves the session looking idle.