Kowalski 2.5: Double Click, and start things in any order

Two releases went out at the end of September, and both came from the same exercise: recording a first run of kowalski from scratch and fixing whatever got in the way. The recording now goes from download to answers in one take, and on a Mac it no longer needs a terminal at all.

Download, drag, open

Kowalski 2.5, Double Click, ships Kowalski.dmg with every release. Open it, drag Kowalski to Applications and open it: it starts kowalski and opens your browser on Setup. It runs on Apple Silicon and Intel, and it's signed with our Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it without asking you to lower any security settings. Clicking the Dock icon opens the browser again, and quitting the app stops kowalski.

Download Kowalski.dmg

Here's the whole first run, from the installer to the answers. The model's thinking time is sped up, and the tableski sign-in itself isn't shown:

Recording it found three bugs a first-time user would have hit, and 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 fixed them. Setup now restarts kowalski after you sign in to tableski, so the agents get its tools straight away. Save creates the files folder Setup suggests, instead of refusing it because it doesn't exist yet. And the Spreadsheet analyst shows each question's own result rows under its answers.

Start things in any order

This part is 2.4, Reconnect. Our first take of the new demo failed before the model had said a word: kowalski was already running when we started tableski, so the Spreadsheet analyst found no tables until we restarted kowalski. Nobody should have to know the right order to start two programs in.

Kowalski talks to its tools over MCP: tableski for spreadsheets, a gateway for the Docker catalog, anything you add in config.toml. Until now it connected to them once, at start, and a server that wasn't up yet was forgotten.

Now a server that doesn't answer is kept on a waiting list. Kowalski tries it again after 5 seconds, then 10, 20, and every minute after that, and stops as soon as it answers. It also tries straight away when a run needs one of that server's tools, so a question you ask right after starting tableski doesn't wait for the next tick. The log says so when it works:

INFO  MCP server 'tableski' connected after a retry
INFO  MCP server 'tableski' exposed 5 tool(s)

A local tableski, explained

The horde page has a Workbooks card for uploading files to tableski.io. With a tableski running on your own machine it used to show an upload box and then a red error, because a local tableski has no upload. Now the card says what is going on: your tableski serves the files it was started with, and tableski --file your.xlsx is how you give it another one.

Three fixes the camera found

• A horde with its own form no longer shows a stray "Follow-up question" field under it.
• A finished run no longer keeps a red "No progress arrived in 60 s" warning. The warning is for a run that never started, and it goes away at the first sign of life.
• Small models sometimes wrap their whole answer in a code block. Kowalski now saves the answer itself, so the Spreadsheet analyst's hand-off renders as answers instead of grey Markdown source.

With those fixed, the new recording runs from the Hordes home through ⌘K, two questions, a follow-up on the same data and the Runs page in one take:

For Rust users

The four crates are on crates.io as 2.5.0. Since 2.3, kowalski-core's MCP types have changed: McpHub::attach registers the hub's tools with a ToolManager and keeps them coming, McpHub::bindings() replaces iter_bindings(), and ToolManager can ask a refresher for tools it doesn't have yet. The changelog has the details.

Get it

On a Mac, Kowalski.dmg. On a Mac or Linux, from a terminal:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/yarenty/kowalski/main/install.sh | bash
kowalski

Or cargo add kowalski. New here? Start with Meet Kowalski, then Mission Control, the release that gave kowalski its calm home screen.

No penguins were harmed in the making of this release. One was mildly confused by a CSV. 🐧