pi v0.85.0: persistent thinking effort, fullscreen transcript controls, restorable in-memory sessions

pi v0.85.0 was published on September 4, 2026. It is a feature release, and it also ships the past week’s merge batches: vllmPriority and supportsMaxOutputTokens model settings, ctx.cwd path resolution for the built-in tools, NO_PROXY root-domain and subdomain matching, and the seccomp and Zed terminal fixes all ride along.

The headline features target state and the fullscreen TUI. Supported Anthropic transports keep Claude thinking effort persistent across turns and recover safely from signed-thinking mismatches. The fullscreen transcript gains a clickable jump-to-latest label bound to the tui.altScreen.bottom shortcut while scrolled up, and the streaming working indicator moves into the default editor border, styled to the thinking-level border color — custom editors keep the standalone indicator unless they opt in to embedding it. And SessionManager.inMemory() can restore externally managed session entries through the SDK, making in-memory sessions resumable instead of throwaway.

Two additions continue the week’s compat-flag work: vllmPriority for vLLM scheduler priority and supportsMaxOutputTokens for OpenAI Responses output limits are now inherited model settings. Fullscreen transcript search gets faster on large transcripts by caching unchanged results, indexing ASCII runs, and limiting highlight work to visible matches. A smaller inherited addition extends LaTeX rendering to relational algebra join symbols.

The fixed list is long. Provider and catalog: the unavailable Grok Build 0.1 leaves /model, the Qwen Token Plan Individual catalog gains Qwen3.8 Flash, Codex SSE parsing processes terminal events not followed by a blank line, Copilot’s Claude Fable 5 sends selected reasoning levels, and Baseten GLM-5.2 stops advertising image input. Sessions: concurrent shares, imported-session filename collisions, fork compaction boundaries, and RPC aborts during manual compaction are all resolved. Platform: the bash, edit, find, grep, ls, read, and write tools honor ctx.cwd; skills stay available when bash is the only enabled tool; musl Linux gets statically linked fd and ripgrep downloads; and proxied plain-HTTP provider requests tunnel with CONNECT instead of hanging after a tool call.

The complete changelog, with per-PR links, is on the v0.85.0 release page.