Blog

Announcements, walk-throughs and notes from building Vancetope. The canonical home for everything that’s shared elsewhere — each post is the full story; links from other channels point back here.

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• Vancetope 0.4.1 — your stack no longer upgrades itself 2026-09-15

  A patch release with one job: Docker stacks from the setup wizard now pin the exact version they were built from. Updates happen on purpose — by re-running the wizard — and the rolling latest channel stays available for those who want it.

• Vancetope 0.4.0 — capture from the browser, encryption that stops at the server, an engine for small models 2026-09-15

  The fourth release is out. 0.4.0 reaches in three directions at once: a browser extension that captures links and pages into your projects, age encryption where the server never sees plaintext, and Benjy — an orchestration engine built for models you can run on your own machine. Plus a council chat, a guard system, quizzes, and a release-ready mobile shell.

• Vancetope, benchmarked on models you can run on your own machine 2026-09-02

  We re-ran the Vance capability suite against four open-weight model families in the 20–35B range, all served locally through Ollama on Apple Silicon. They hold up — and that's the point: the model, the data, and the runtime are yours.

• Vancetope 0.3.0 — apps, mounted files, the inbox becomes a thing 2026-08-28

  The third release is out. 0.3.0 grows the surface in three directions at once: a sandboxed app runtime where a view is a document, mounted foreign files you can read like your own, and an inbox that is finally an entity instead of a queue. Plus cluster placement, a run view, and the first agentic user loop.

• Vancetope 0.2.0 — consolidating how the AI behaves 2026-08-12

  The second release is out. 0.1.0 proved the thing runs; 0.2.0 is about making the agents behave — guards, control commands, a bounded tool surface, and a long list of provider quirks that no longer bite.

• Vancetope 0.1.0 — the first release 2026-07-30

  The very first tagged release of Vancetope is out. It's early, it's rough, and it's real — you can install it today.

• Research a topic, end to end — in one conversation 2026-07-30

  Ask once, and Vancetope commissions a deep-dive with Marvin, reshapes it into a mindmap, illustrates it, compiles a document — and exports a PDF. All without leaving the chat.

• Size up a stock with live data — a grounded answer, not a chatbot one 2026-07-29

  Ask about a stock and Vancetope pulls the prices off the web, charts them as candlesticks, and returns an assessment that cites the numbers it stands on.

• Stress-test an idea with a panel of AI judges 2026-07-28

  Stand up a reusable council of distinct AI personas, throw a pitch at it, and get one synthesised verdict — with the disagreement kept intact.