A Slack-style activity panel and richer chat attachments

Your chat sidebar and Activity panel now behave the way you’d expect from a modern messaging app. Channels go bold when there are unreads and only badge for direct mentions, the bell shows mentions, DMs, and reactions as separate tabs, and reactions to your messages finally show up as notifications. Video and file attachments play and download inline, presence dots sit on every human avatar, and a long round of performance work makes channel switching and the sidebar feel noticeably quicker.

A Slack-style Activity panel

The bell is now an Activity panel with four tabs — All, Mentions, DMs, and Reactions — plus an Unreads toggle and a footer button to mark everything as read. The badge count on the bell finally matches what’s inside the panel instead of counting every channel message in your workspace.

In the sidebar, channel names go bold and bright when they have unread messages and stay muted when they don’t, so you can scan for activity at a glance. A numeric badge only appears when someone directly @mentions you, matching what Slack does. The Channels and Projects icons on the workspace rail also badge by mention count; the DMs icon keeps its full unread count, since a DM is always directed at you.

Reactions to your messages are now a first-class notification. When someone reacts to something you sent, the bell ticks up, the Reactions tab fills in, and you see who reacted with which emoji. Reacting to your own message stays quiet, and toggling a reaction off doesn’t generate a duplicate.

Video and file attachments play in chat

Non-image attachments used to show as an inert paperclip. Now videos render inline with native player controls when the codec is supported, and fall back to a tile with Play and Download buttons when it isn’t — Play opens the file in your system media player, Download saves it locally. PDFs, archives, and anything else show as a single-click download tile with the filename, and screen recordings from macOS just work.

You can now see who reacted

Hover an emoji reaction on a message to see the list of reactors — avatars, display names, and “You” labeled clearly at the top of the list when you’re one of them. When more than four people have piled on, a View all button opens the full list in a dialog.

Presence dots on chat avatars

Every message and author profile in chat now shows a small presence dot — online, away, or busy — on human avatars. Specialists don’t get a dot, since they don’t have a presence to show.

Workspaces and seats

Workspace owners can now increase or decrease the number of seats on an active subscription directly from billing settings. Member invites are gated by the seats you’ve purchased, and view-only invites are handled cleanly without consuming a paid seat. The billing settings page itself was redesigned to match the rest of the settings screen — labeled sections inside a tighter card layout, banners that actually use their warning colors, and a clearer empty state when you don’t have a payment method on file yet.

Two new specialists

Two specialists join the marketplace:

• Chloe, a first-party platform-wide operator that can delegate to any specialist you have installed — including the ones you’ve built yourself — and file feedback on your behalf when you ask it to report a bug.
• An unofficial PostHog specialist with broad product and documentation grounding. The hosted PostHog connection is optional, so you can use the specialist for docs questions without giving it live access.

A faster, quieter chat

A round of work makes channel switching and the sidebar feel noticeably quicker:

• Clicking a channel now updates the sidebar highlight and shows a loading state immediately, so cold conversations no longer feel like a dead click.
• The joined-rooms list that powers the sidebar loads against your own channels and DMs only, instead of scanning the whole workspace.
• Switching between recent channels reuses the existing connection instead of tearing it down and rebuilding it, so coming back to a channel you just left is instant.
• Off-screen loading shimmers pause until they’re visible, and respect your reduced-motion setting.
• Chat messages, tool blocks, and timeline cards skip rerenders when nothing about them has changed.
• The sidebar gutters drop a heavy background-blur effect that was costing paint time on every frame, and the long shadow behind the shell is lighter now.

Polish & fixes

Closing a thread no longer scrolls the channel back to the top — your previous position is preserved. Archived channels stay archived after you delete them, even across app restarts and reloads. Selecting Join on a single channel no longer races against a bulk-join action; the bulk button stays disabled until the single join resolves. The Browse channels dialog keeps its Join buttons visible on narrow windows and at larger UI scales, no longer scrolls horizontally, and long descriptions wrap instead of pushing the layout. The main channel composer and the thread composer now share the same frame spacing so the layout doesn’t shift when you open a thread. Bare URLs pasted into chat render compactly instead of as a giant card. New thread panels for channels, DMs, and project chats share the same conversation shell, and the manual scroll position restores near the message you were reading when you switch conversations and come back. Workflow specialists now prefer the persistent task tools so their work stays visible in the Tasks UI. Embedded VS Code panels and the in-app browser start up reliably on production builds, the editor terminal tracks the right process again, and rapid panel switches no longer surface a stray console error. Specialist prompt examples render correctly when the prompt itself contains template-style placeholders. Model metadata in the provider list stays current with the latest published runtime IDs and context windows.