New features

• The nod. During setup your Library asks whether it may read the messages on your Mac. One yes covers every app, or name just the ones you are comfortable with. It only ever reads, never sends, and your answer is recorded app by app.
• Already set up? The first time you ask your Library to read your messages, it asks for the nod once.
• No stays no. A declined app is remembered and not raised again unless you bring it up, and an unclear answer like "all but Signal" gets a follow-up question instead of a guess.

Fixes

• Updates wait for unfinished work. If your notes are in the middle of a merge or a rewind, the update steps aside instead of saving over it, so a conflict can never be saved into your notes as if it were settled. An update also can no longer start while a fresh install is still being set up.
• Your notes are saved before an update only when the update will really install. An update that could not download or verify used to leave that save behind anyway.
• One update check at a time. Two checks starting together could trip over the same download and show a false warning that the update was not signed by Keystone.
• The daily update check is shown as running only when your Mac is really running it, and moving or renaming a Library no longer leaves an old check behind.
• A Library with no relay set up no longer ends each update on a setup error.
• Files of an unfamiliar type now open. A peer's tax filings arrived intact but were labelled unreadable; the Library now works out a file's type from its contents, and reads XML and any other text file.

New features

• Receiving on its own. A confirmed pairing switches on a small background check, and the update itself switches it on for every Library that was already paired. What a peer sends you, files included, arrives without you asking.
• Receive only when asked, if you prefer. Remove the background check and the Library records your choice, so it stays off through future updates; its status page says which way it is set.

Fixes

• Two checks can no longer run at once. The Mac app, the background check and a check you run by hand now take turns, so nothing you received is ever half-recorded.
• On a Mac that hosts two Libraries, each background check now reads its own mailbox, never the other one's.

New features

• The Soul. Every Library keeps a note about who it is: its name, its manner, what it cares about in the work. It starts the note at setup and grows it in small touches as it reads, a line added, a word sharpened. Ask it to build out its soul and it drafts the fuller note for your approval.
• The audience read. When the Library studies your sent messages to learn how you write, it now also learns what it is like to talk to you: how much you actually read, how direct you are, how you correct. It turns that into working-style rules for itself, never into an imitation of you, and never quotes a message to do it.
• Connect your sources in one click. Setup offers email and Slack through the chat app's own connectors: your sign-in, in your control, nothing stored in the Library. The deeper mailbox setup with app passwords is still there for scheduled background reads; it is offered only when you ask for more than a connector can give.
• The first phrases. A young Library that has never read your messages hands you the exact things to say ("read my messages", "catch me up on WhatsApp") and says once why it matters: every read fills the voice corpus and sharpens its picture of who and what matters to you.
• A name of its own, maybe. At the naming step the Library may float one name it would pick for itself, one light line, never a list, dropped without comment if you choose otherwise.

Changes

• Setup no longer asks you to name the key people in your life. A list recited cold is guesswork; the People pages fill themselves within days from your contacts, your messages, and your daily notes. Anyone you volunteer is still filed.
• A served Library keeps itself current. The daily update now covers it, and the server your chat talks to restarts itself onto the new engine when one lands, so a served Library can no longer run old code indefinitely.
• The Library ships in three shapes: the folder on your Mac, the served Library, and the hosted one. Two shapes nothing ever used are gone; an older setup that still names them keeps working and is told, gently, that they are retired.
• Filing work in progress is staged inside the Library's own folder, so a restart mid-drain loses nothing and two Libraries filing at once no longer share a scratch space. The staging area stays invisible to your notes, your searches, and your history.

New features

• Every message, kept. A message log lives in your notes, and a correspondence page per peer shows each conversation newest first: who wrote, the subject, what it asked, the words the owner read, and the timeline from sent to delivered to filed.
• Conversations. A reply carries the thread it belongs to, both Libraries group mail by conversation, and the agent reads the whole thread before drafting a reply.
• The ask. A push can say what it wants from the other owner: nothing but a look, a read, a reply, or a decision, with a reply-by date, and whether the owner dictated the words or their agent wrote them. Asks are shown, never acted on: your Library tells you, and the decision stays yours.
• Waiting mail is listed by what it asks: the nearest deadline first, then reads, then the rest, so the thing that needs you tops the list.
• Ask about your mail in chat: the message log answers by peer, by conversation, or by date, without opening a single file.

Fixes

• Installing from Downloads no longer strands the chat doing the install. The installer moves your Library to its home folder first, and it now leaves a small shortcut at the old spot so the open conversation keeps working through its own move. The shortcut is safe to delete once the install is done.
• Bringing a 3.0 Library forward now also moves it to the safe home folder, out of iCloud's reach, the same careful way.

New features

• One command, alexandria clock, says what time it really is: checked against four public time servers at once, cached for ten minutes, thrown out the moment the computer's clock is moved. It prints the true time, the local time, how far off the computer's clock is, and where the answer came from. Exit code 2 means the computer's clock is wrong and the printed time wins.
• Every date the Library writes comes from that clock: a todo's added date, the daily note, the digest's today and tomorrow, a capture's time, a reader's window. The hourly sweep measures the clock first, stamps from it, and logs a warning when the computer's clock is off. The Library's own instructions say to run the clock before stamping anything.
• A release notice on the relay: when a new version is out, every Library reads the signed notice within minutes and tells its owner what changed and where the download is.
• One push can go to several Libraries at once, as one group, and each recipient sees who else received it.
• Every session in Claude Desktop's Code tab opens with the clock: the Library prints the verified time into the session before the first word, so a date is never typed from memory. An existing Library picks this up on its next update.

Changes

• Every call a Library makes to the relay carries its engine version, so the operator can see which versions are in use.
• The release jobs that hold secrets run in a protected environment.
• The README describes what ships today: the version ladder, the zip and its signed release, the full command line, the tool registry, federation over the relay, and the three shapes a Library can take.
• The Library's instructions no longer name an Obsidian plugin as a way in. The order is now the served Library first, the local filesystem server if it resolves, and the GitHub connector as the fallback. The Obsidian setup note is retired and leaves an existing Library on its next update; the Claude Desktop note configures the filesystem server only.
• The playbooks carry the week's lessons: a screenshot capture is left to a running inbox drain and the target notes are re-checked before a manifest is applied; a message is checked against the vault for a later resolution before it is reported as still owed; a Viber backup that has not moved means no automatic backup runs; a long news catch-up is clustered day by day; the per-app Screen Time stream keeps about eleven days; where iMessage attachments live; a push names its source notes; a hidden Browser pane cannot be screenshotted.

Fixes

• WhatsApp group messages show the sender's name again. Current WhatsApp builds key group members by an id with no phone number in it, and every message read as from a scrambled string; the reader now finds the name through the sender's direct chat, drops the scrambled push names, and marks a push name it cannot verify.
• The productivity audit counts a session on the day of its last message, not the day its file was last touched. A backup or sync that re-stamps every session file had pushed whole days of sessions into one day and reported duplicate asks that never happened.
• The inbox drain refuses a filing proposal whose todo, person or event entry has no edit to carry it, and names the entry, so nothing a filer proposed can vanish without a report.
• The inbox drain writes a bullet, a checkbox, a table row or a quoted line on its own line, below the whole item it follows, instead of gluing it onto the end of the anchor's line or dropping it inside a wrapped bullet.
• A news link with accented or other non-ASCII characters in it is fetched instead of failing before the request leaves the machine.

New features

• A message to the owner rides a push. Open a package with a Message heading addressed to the person, write the note, then start the content under the package's own title; the engine sends the note as the message and the rest as the content. A one-line push takes the note as a flag, and a push from chat takes it on the staged item. Sealed end to end like everything else, 16 KiB at most.
• Every place a received push shows up shows the message first, quoted as the sender's words: the capture in the inbox gets a Message section above the content, the review list and its JSON carry it, the review note quotes it, and the relay peek shows it before the Library has even pulled the push.
• The playbooks follow: the federation skill opens every package with the message, and the relay check leads its report with it.

Fixes

• A received package keeps its own title once; the capture no longer repeats the subject above it.
• The 5.2.0 release zip never built: the ship gate caught a real name in an example in the new module. 5.2.1 uses a placeholder, runs the same scan inside the test suite, and the release ritual runs the zip gates before a tag.

New features

• Files ride a push. Attach an image, a PDF, a spreadsheet, anything in the Library, and it arrives in the other person's inbox folder beside the message, sealed end to end; the relay sees only ciphertext. About 18 MiB of files fit beside the text. A set larger than that is several pushes, and one file over the budget is refused by name rather than split.
• The relay carries 32 MiB per push, four times what it did, and every Library says what it can take, so a big push is never sent to a Library that would drop it unread.
• Viber, read alongside iMessage and WhatsApp: Viber for Mac's store when it opens, else the iPhone's iCloud backup mirrored on the Mac. Read-only, and honest that a backup read ends at the backup.

Changes

• The doctor reads the Library's state home first: which directory the engine runs from and why, and whether any other state directory on the machine holds a second identity, stray secrets or leftovers. A stray identity that never paired can be set aside with the fix flag; nothing is deleted.
• The 32 MiB line is stated plainly wherever it applies, and the design for carrying larger files later is written down and parked.

Fixes

• An update can no longer move a Library's identity. An update on 2026-09-10 found an old state directory beside the real one, minted a fresh identity there and left the peer secrets behind, so every push failed and the peers' pushes went unread. The engine now follows the identity key itself, and a push to a paired Library whose token is missing waits instead of failing, then goes out the moment the token is back.
• Hosted Libraries: an upgrade follows the same engine pin new Libraries are born on and records the engine each Library moved to; a suspended Library is refused an upgrade until it is resumed; the upgrade command no longer crashes after finishing its work.

Fixes

• The graph page (a Library's own /graph/ page and the page the graph command writes) pans, zooms and hovers smoothly on Libraries with thousands of notes. A drag step or a scroll tick that took up to a few hundredths of a second now takes well under a thousandth, and the crisp redraw runs once per gesture.
• The picture is unchanged: the same lines, the same colors, the same layout.
• The page the graph command writes now says to open the Library's own graph to read a note, instead of telling you to start a file server.

Fixes

• The engine's bookkeeping files (the sweep's state and heartbeat, the team-inbox ledger, the inbox-to-todo ledger and the federation ledger) look up where they live each time they are used, instead of once when the engine starts. Nothing moves for a running Library, and the engine's own tests can no longer write into a developer's live Library.
• Hosted, server and workflow Libraries get their ignore rules, settings and workflow files back. The packaged engine had been leaving them out of a fresh Library since the beginning.
• Inbox proposals in those same Libraries are now checked against their schema instead of being quietly waved through.
• The what's-new panel now appears on those Libraries too; it had been silently missing.
• Every release build is now checked for missing files before it ships, so this cannot come back.

Changes

• The launch screen names what four new skills do: daily plan, mail setup, productivity audit and voice.
• The switch that turns the served graph page off is checked when you set it, and a value that is not a real yes or no now turns the page off instead of leaving it on.
• The setup guides say the Library has a name, not an address, everywhere.

Fixes

• The 5.0.0 notes overstated the graph page: the page you open from the Library is a small shell that fetches the layout, and the layout grows with the Library. The notes now say so, and the number of tools a Library offers is recorded rather than implied.
• Reaching the served graph through a hosted rack is untested and no longer claimed.

New features

• A new way to review what you've shared with another person's Library. It shows each thing you sent, in order, and whether it was delivered and taken in; you can look at one person or at everyone.
• The quiet acknowledgements that travel between Libraries are kept separate from the things you actually sent, so the list reads as what you shared and not as background chatter.

Changes

• The per-peer switch that let a trusted feed file straight into your notes is retired. Everything a peer sends is captured to your inbox and waits for you — nothing a peer sends is ever written into your Library on its own.
• A note you send no longer names a folder on the other person’s side. It arrives as content their Library takes in and files where it belongs; a to-do you send still names their list.

Changes

• Every save the served Library makes holds a lock shared with the machine's other Library writers. A busy lock is waited for, and a network push that hangs is abandoned after 90 seconds instead of holding everyone up.

New features

• A daily check runs on your Mac in the background: a small timer the Library installs for itself the first time it opens or updates. When a newer signed release exists, it applies it. Off switch: alexandria.auto_update: false in your settings.
• "Update my brain" is one command. It fetches the latest signed release, verifies it, applies it, and tells you what changed.

Changes

• Notes you are still editing no longer block an update. They are saved first as their own commit, the update lands as the next one, and there is always an exact point to return to.
• After an update the Library reports its new version to the relay, so the fleet view shows what each Library actually runs.

Fixes

• A served Library with a damaged heartbeat file no longer thinks its old sync job is still running. It takes over, as it should.
• On a rack, a config file missing from the host now fails loudly at start instead of quietly replacing the sign-in service with one that can only crash.

New features

• ax-messages reads your email through the mail connector your chat app already has (in Claude, the Gmail connector). What someone sent you, what you owe a reply, one thread in full. Read-only, nothing to set up, and the Library never sends mail.
• ax-messages also reads the relay: anything another person's Library pushed to yours and is waiting on your decision appears in the same read, marked as theirs.

Changes

• ax-attention-digest is deprecated. "What needs me" now runs through ax-messages, across email, texts and WhatsApp at once. The old skill stays one more release.
• ax-digest-now is gone as a skill. "Send my digest now" still works: the steps moved into the Library's manual.
• ax-clean-root is folded into ax-health. A health check now also tidies the empty files Obsidian leaves in the root, and shows you what it would remove first.

Changes

• ax-messages reads iMessage and WhatsApp as one skill. Name the app and it reads that one, name a person and it reads both and merges the answer.
• ax-health tells you how your Library is doing in one read: how it is growing, and whether anything is broken. It replaces the stats and integrity skills.

New features

• Type /ax in the chat window: every Alexandria skill, in one list, nothing else mixed in.
• The Mac-local readers (Messages, WhatsApp, Contacts, Screen Time, Screenshots) are on the list from day one. Ask for one with its module off and the skill turns the module on in a single step.

Changes

• Skills carry the ax- prefix: /ax-settings, /ax-ingestion, /ax-query, /ax-update and the rest. Plain words work exactly as before.

Fixes

• An update now refreshes the skills list and removes the old names. Before, a Library kept whatever list it was installed with, and a skill for a module that was never turned on pointed at nothing.
• Skills no longer appear in the Obsidian graph. They were filed as notes, so each showed up as a lonely dot. They now live with the Library's machinery, out of your notes and out of the graph, and an update clears the old ones away.
• A new Library no longer ships the Obsidian Git plugin pre-installed and switched on. Saving and syncing were always the Library's own job. Obsidian stays optional, its plugins stay your choice.

Changes

• Blocking a peer also clears anything they left waiting for you at the relay.
• A stuck message at the front of your mailbox no longer holds up the ones behind it.
• The relay is built from an exact, pinned recipe, and a deploy can never roll it back to an older build by accident.

New features

• What a peer sends lands in your inbox, not in your notes. File it where it belongs, approve it as suggested, or decline it. Nothing a peer sends is written into your Library on its own.
• Anything longer than a line travels as a packaged note and arrives as its own note, not as a bullet in someone's area page.
• Receipts tell the truth: received means it is waiting for them, applied means they filed it, declined means they chose not to.

Changes

• Packaged notes are written in an outbox folder the Library ignores, so a push is never a second copy of what you already know.
• Filing straight through is a per-peer switch, for a trusted automated feed. Off for everyone by default.

Fixes

• A read-only Library never receives on its own.

New features

• A Library that goes quiet for a while is never forgotten by the relay.
• The relay keeps a second copy of its records, backed up daily.

New features

• Import your contacts, selectively: put names on your message threads, fill the blank fields of People notes you already have, look someone up, or add the people you name. Never the whole address book.
• Read your WhatsApp history: what someone sent you, what you owe a reply, catch me up on a group. Media stays where it is.
• A card exported from Contacts, Google or Outlook works too, on any machine.

Fixes

• Two contact files can no longer merge two different people into one.
• Filling in a People note never overwrites a field you already filled.
• WhatsApp calls show as calls, not as unknown messages.

New features

• Every release is signed. The Library checks the signature before it applies an update and refuses one it cannot verify.
• A newer signed release is applied when the Library opens, and the previous version stays one rollback away.
• The software travels inside the Library. An update needs no account and no token.

Changes

• A Library on your own machine has no email channel. Everything email would have done, ask for in chat.

New features

• Say "show me my brain" and the Library draws itself: every note a dot, sized by its links, as a picture and as a live pane you can hover and pan.
• Three more readers for your Mac: a world news briefing from many newsrooms, your screenshots, and your screen time.
• Update from a fresh zip in one motion. Your notes are never touched.

Changes

• Day one tells the truth about what is switched on and what is not.