Humbug v48 is another mixture of front-end and back-end updates but the big theme for this one has been to dramatically improve the handling of AI models and AI backends. It also has a new user manual (finally).
AI backends and models
One thing that has been annoying for a while is having both thinking and non-thinking versions of AI models having to be distinct entries in the model table. v48 fixes this by exposing reasoning levels where they are currently configurable. Doing this also closed out some very old GitHub issues items.
Going a step further, I changed the whole conversation backend to track the AI model provider as well as the model, allowing the model name to be identical and duplicated across different providers. This gives a nicer user experience as now the same model can have the same display name, irrespective of backend. For example, this now means I can see the same GLM model via ollama.com and z.ai.
Another really nice UX change came from Tharik, with a much nicer implementation of the AI model settings.
Finally, I added a second instance of the Ollama backend so now I can use ollama.com and local models at the same time.
Building a user manual
One of the more interesting uses of AI in v48 has been to build the user manual. I gave this to Claude Haiku in thinking mode and let it navigate the codebase to work out all the pieces, how things work, and how the user might use them. The result has been surprisingly good.
It structured a document with an index and 20 chapters, and worked out a nice user journey through reading them.
I will look to integrate this into the runtime experience of Humbug at some point.
Version 48
New features:
- New text being streamed by an AI is now presented in a much more smooth way, eliminating the "jumpiness" of text chunks delivered via the API endpoint.
- Added support for reasoning levels against models that support reasoning levels. This simplifies the model catalogue as it shrinks dramatically.
- Removed Gemini 2.5 support and added more Gemini 3 models.
- In an editor tab, Ctrl+G (on all platforms) will navigate you to a specific line.
- In an editor tab, Cmd+Opt+F (MacOS) or Ctrl+H (other platforms) will open the "find and replace" control.
- Added separate support for Ollama cloud and Ollama running locally.
- Separated the concept of the AI model and the AI model provider, making it possible to have the same model accessible via different routes, but using the same model name.
- The mindspace settings now offers the ability to fetch all available models from a given AI provider, and to remove any that were fetched this way.
Bug fixes:
- Correctly resolved an earlier problem with streaming text and rendering, where the user is looking at an earlier part of the conversation.
- Resolved problems in the Java syntax highlighter (around handling of generics).
- If a file open in a diff view is saved then the scroll position within the diff view is now preserved.
- If a file open in an editor view is saved externally then the scroll position within the editor tab is now preserved.
- Arabic text line numbers now line up with the text.
Internal structure changes:
- Added pytest tests for the Java syntax highlighter.