One terminal, 148 plugins
A message is a question again, a build asks where before it touches anything, and 148 MCP servers are one click from any agent. The agent system in 1.16 was rebuilt around one correction: asking an agent a question should not start a coding session.
A message was starting a build
Every message to an agent used to launch a coding CLI in a zellij worktree. "What is the status of the release?" opened a session, cloned a worktree and waited for a harness to boot, in order to answer a question that needed no code at all. The fix is not clever: a message goes to the agent's own model and comes back as an answer.
When a request really does need code, the agent says so and xNAUT asks
where. The run happens in a worktree under
.worktrees/, never in the checkout you have open, and the
repository is asked for once per thread rather than every time you speak.
148 plugins, and what that actually means
A plugin in xNAUT is an MCP server: someone else's program, speaking a protocol your agent understands. The library now holds 148 of them, from the ones we run every day to the compiled contents of the public registries. Between them they ship 961 skills, which is the more interesting number: a connector gives an agent tools, a skill tells it when to reach for them.
Two gates, on purpose. A plugin is configured once, on your machine, with
your credential. Then it is handed to one agent, with the
+ in that agent's header. Nothing is pooled, and a chat turn
never quietly acquires a capability you granted to something else.
xNAUT hosts none of them, sells none of them and vets none of them. The catalogue says what each one is, what it needs and what tools it reports, and the rest is your call. Browse the catalogue →
Agents that repair their own connectors
The Forgejo plugin was broken in the most ordinary way: the npm package
named forgejo-mcp ships no executable, so npx could
never run it. The interesting part is what happened next. Asked to add it, the
agent inspected the package, found that it had no binary, searched for one
that did, discovered that Forgejo speaks the Gitea API, repaired the plugin to
use gitea-mcp and connected it.
That is the difference between an assistant that explains an error and one that fixes it. The same agent will also switch a plugin on, write a document into the split pane beside your conversation, or draw the diagram it is describing.
Your plan, not another API bill
xNAUT drives the coding CLI you already have. If you pay for Claude or for Codex, that subscription is what pays, and there is no key to paste. If you have neither, add an API key and it overrides everything. That is the whole configuration story.
Also in 1.16
The Librarian became an agent rather than a pane, so it searches and writes the vault through tools. The Mesh inbox lets an agent ask you a question, request approval before something irreversible, or leave you a task, and a question parks until you answer it and survives a restart. There is a skills library. And the whole interface zooms with Cmd + and Cmd -, which matters more than it sounds like it does.
Windows shipped a version late: 1.16.0 built on macOS and died at link time on Windows because SQLite is a system library on one and not the other. The release notes have the detail.