## Houston 0.4.5

A reliability and polish release. Chat now recovers gracefully when a CLI provider misbehaves, attachments render in the conversation, the sidebar stays usable for agents with long names, and the language across Skills surfaces is consistent with the rest of the product.

### What's new

- **Consistent Skills surfaces.** The cards you used to see in Skills are the same ones you see elsewhere in the app, with consistent copy. Browsing, adding, and inspecting community Skills feels like one product, not two.
- **A "+" button in the Running column.** You no longer have to leave the board to start a mission. The Running column has its own footer button that opens New Mission with the composer already focused.
- **Composer focus on new missions.** Open New Mission and your cursor is already in the message box. Type, send, done.
- **Attachments render inline.** When you or an agent share a file in chat, you see it as a proper attachment card in the conversation, not a raw filename.
- **Bug reports go straight to Linear.** Send a bug from inside Houston and it lands as a ticket the team triages, with the diagnostics already attached.
- **Sidebar controls stay visible for long agent names.** The follow-up chip and the 3-dot menu no longer get pushed off-screen when an agent has a long name.

### Reliability

- **Recovery from malformed Claude requests.** A specific class of provider error used to leave the chat stuck. Houston now surfaces a recovery card so you can retry without restarting the agent.
- **Tool runtime errors show up as recovery cards.** When a tool fails mid-mission, you see a card explaining what happened and offering a retry instead of a silent stall.
- **Anthropic reconnect only fires when auth is confirmed.** Houston no longer flashes reconnect prompts during the brief window before sign-in finishes resolving.
- **Community skill search is hardened.** Edge cases that used to throw or return empty when searching the community library are handled.

### Before you upgrade

- Quit Houston before installing. macOS does not always replace a running app cleanly. If in doubt, remove `/Applications/Houston.app` and drag the new copy in.

### If you are on 0.4.3 or 0.4.4

Houston should detect 0.4.5, download it, install it, and relaunch into the new version on its own.

### If you are on 0.4.2 or earlier

Auto-update will not pull you forward from those builds. Quit Houston, drag a fresh DMG over `/Applications/Houston.app`, and reopen. After that one manual step you are back on the healthy updater path and future versions apply automatically.

### Known limitations

- Windows support is still in progress. Engine compiles for Windows, signing and CI are next.
- Mobile companion is still beta. Expect occasional reconnect hiccups. Keep your Mac awake while using it.
