A highlights view of recent Watchfire releases. The exhaustive version-by-version record — every fix, every migration note — lives in the docs changelog.
v9.0.0 — FirestormLatest
Firestorm 9.0.0
Firestorm turns Watchfire inside out: instead of only driving coding agents, Watchfire is now driven by them. watchfire mcp serve exposes the whole orchestrator to any MCP-capable client — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, opencode, Copilot CLI, or a custom agent — as an 18-tool factory. The outer agent plans and reviews; Watchfire manufactures the code in sandboxed, git-worktree-isolated runs and merges the results. The canonical loop is create_task → run_task → wait_for_task → get_task → get_task_diff → iterate.
Inferno is the parallel-workspaces tentpole — the first feature-forward major since v4 "Beacon", built for supervising many projects at once. The Electron GUI goes multi-window: a main-process window registry replaces the single mainWindow, opening one independent window per project (single-instance lock, per-window state + session restore, Cmd+N and window cycling, IPC fan-out, and per-window PTY routing so a terminal's bytes and OS notifications never cross windows). Each project window flips to a chat-primary layout with the agent terminal as the wide left pane and Tasks/Definition/Insights/Secrets/Trash/Settings as a right reference region. The plain markdown <textarea>s become a real CodeMirror rich editor (formatting toolbar + source ⇄ split ⇄ preview, closing #22), wildfire mode lands in the GUI behind a confirm-gated start with a live Execute → Refine → Generate phase indicator, and the promoted Dashboard becomes mission control — a live home window with per-project wildfire phase, cross-project needs-attention with click-through, and a stretch always-on-top mini-monitor. Finally, code-output analytics measure what the agents actually shipped: per-task <n>.metrics.yaml captures commits/files/lines/merge-kind, rolled up into project and fleet Insights, the GUI's KPI cards and churn-by-day chart, mission-control "shipped" lines, and the CSV/Markdown exports plus weekly digest.
Multi-window GUI foundation
Per-window state + session restore
"Open in new window" affordances + window shortcuts
Forge 7.4 closes a class of "wildfire stops even though there's a ready task sitting right there, and drops back to chat" reports. Traced live on a real project, the symptom turned out to be three independent daemon bugs plus a runaway log that buried the evidence: Generate produced a ready task, the chain stamped it started, but no agent ever ran it — and the one log line that would have explained why was drowned under hundreds of MB of self-referential watcher spam. This release fixes the runaway log at the source, moves the verbose per-project trail into per-project log files so the global daemon.log stays readable, makes a launch failure unable to strand a ready task, and stops the issue detector from false-positiving on ordinary agent output.
The daemon log no longer feeds an infinite fsnotify loop
First run after upgrade reclaims an oversized legacy daemon.log
A launch failure can no longer strand a ready task and silently drop to chat
Forge 7.3 is primarily a GUI release. The Electron app gains a focus-chat mode that collapses the center column so the right panel (Chat / Branches / Logs) takes the full row, and the running Watchfire version now sits under the sidebar logo so you no longer have to dig through Settings → About to know what you're on. The version bump to 7.3.0 lands across version.json, gui/package.json, and gui/package-lock.json. One daemon-side fix closes the size-cap deferral v7.2.1 left open: ~/.watchfire/daemon.log is now bounded after a user's log grew to 300 GB.
Forge 7.2.1 closes the second wildfire-chain leak that v7.2.0 only half-fixed. With v7.2.0 deployed and the daemon's logs going to /dev/null (Electron-launched stdio fan-out), the Generate phase kept emitting blog-post-style task titles like title: Write a blog post — "Headline: Subhead"; the unquoted : was parsed as a nested mapping, the strict decoder rejected the file, and it was silently skipped — losing 6 of 24 generated tasks in one ~5-hour run. Two prophylactic fixes.
Generate prompts now require single-quoted title: scalars
Daemon logs now persist to ~/.watchfire/daemon.log
Forge 7.2 fixes the wildfire chain dying silently after the Generate phase whenever the agent wrote a task YAML with an empty-string timestamp like started_at: "". Caught live: Generate created tasks with started_at: "", LoadAllTasks aborted on the first parse error, and the daemon dropped into a NO-AGENT state with ready tasks no one would pick up — no chat session, no notification, no obvious failure signal. The fix has three layers.
Wildfire chain no longer silently dies on an empty-string timestamp in a generated task
Forge 7.1 is a GUI-only point release that cleans up the chat terminal regressions introduced alongside v7.0.0's bytes_received cursor work. Typing in chat mode no longer line-steps with [Agent stopped] floods between chunks, Run All / Wildfire starts (and phase transitions) now render the daemon-sent initial prompt instead of dropping it, same-process stream blips no longer replay the buffer onto a stale xterm and stack overlapping Claude Code banners, and the intermittent timed out waiting for previous agent to stop toast when switching modes is gone. The TUI streaming path and the daemon's SubscribeRawOutput protocol are untouched — the fix is GUI-only and lives in four renderer files.
GUI chat — typing no longer line-steps with [Agent stopped] floods between chunks
GUI mode switcher — Generate / Plan / Run All / Wildfire actually start; no more timed out waiting for previous agent to stop toast
Run All / Wildfire — initial prompt actually renders on start and on phase transitions