This release is shaped almost entirely by your feedback. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been listening to what’s frustrating, what’s missing, and where the experience falls short. Every change below came from a real conversation with a real user. That’s how we want to build this product — with you, not just for you.

VSCode Extension — Major Upgrade

The VSCode extension went from a basic chat wrapper to something that feels like it belongs in your editor.

Session Management. The activity bar panel now shows your full session history. Create new sessions, search by name, switch between them with a click. No more losing track of what you were working on. This was directly inspired by feedback that the old sidebar was “just a status indicator that doesn’t help me do anything.”

File Attachments. Hit the + button below the chat input to attach files from your computer. Images are sent as visual context. Text files — code, markdown, configs — are included directly in your message. No more copy-pasting file contents into the chat.

Editor Context Bar. A small indicator above the input shows which files the LLM can see. Expand it to see the full list. You always know what context the AI is working with.

Better Errors. When something goes wrong (like hitting your billing limit), the error now tells you exactly what to do and includes a direct link to fix it. No more cryptic messages.

Desktop App

File Attachments. Same + button as VSCode. Pick any file from your computer and attach it to your message. Attached files show as clean chips with the filename — not broken image thumbnails.

Tab Overflow. If you’re the kind of person who opens a dozen contexts (we see you), the tab bar no longer becomes an unusable scrolling mess. Tabs shrink gracefully, and a dropdown menu gives you access to everything when space runs out.

This one came from a user who asked the AI to “look into shadcn_design_migration.md” — a file sitting right there in their project root — and the AI couldn’t find it. Our file search only looked in the current directory by default. Now it automatically searches recursively and from the repository root when it doesn’t find a match. The kind of thing that should have always worked.

Simplified GitHub Permissions

We’ve heard from multiple teams that installing AI tools is a non-starter because of the permissions they demand. Write access to repos. Admin access to org settings. Webhook permissions that make security teams nervous.

Quarterback needs read-only access. That’s it. We read your repo contents and metadata to provide context. Every code change happens locally on your machine — the LLM uses local tools to edit files, run commands, and commit. We never write to your repository through the GitHub API.

For repos where you can’t install the GitHub App at all (a client’s org, an open-source project), you can now adopt them — Quarterback associates them with your org without needing any GitHub App access. The LLM still works with the code locally on your machine.

And if you’re working on something that isn’t even a git repo — a personal script folder, design docs, a scratch project — that works too. No GitHub connection required.

We updated the GitHub permissions doc with the full details.

Under the Hood

Token refresh fix. Some users were seeing “Session expired” errors even though their session was still valid. The desktop app was checking the local expiry timestamp, deciding the token was fine, and skipping the refresh — even though the server had rejected it. Fixed.

VSCode sidecar path. The VSCode extension couldn’t find the sidecar binary after a recent build change. The extension now handles both old and new binary layouts automatically.

Updated Docs

We’ve rewritten the VSCode extension guide to cover all the new features. The GitHub permissions page now explains how repo access works, what adopted repos are, and how to use Quarterback on projects that aren’t git repositories.

We’re a small team and we read every piece of feedback. If something’s broken, annoying, or missing — tell us. That’s literally how this release happened.