2026-10-03: Humbug v56 and Menai v0.7

Humbug v56

The big theme of v56 is introducing the latest state-of-the-art models from the big commercial AI providers. Perhaps the most significant change is that Humbug now supports the "Responses" API for GPT models, unlocking all the reasoning capabilities that have been unavailable in the "Chat Completions" endpoint.

The secondary theme is reinforcing the role of Menai. Its full standard library is now available to the AIs in Humbug and it's now possible to analyze and transform binary files as well as text files. This unlocks a lot more features in the near future.

New features:

• Menai syntax highlighting now recognises the :: module member access operator as a keyword form.
• Menai syntax highlighting now distinguishes function calls from plain identifiers. The head of an ordinary form is highlighted as a function, while names in binding, parameter, field, export, pattern, namespace, and quoted positions are left as identifiers.
• Added the new export keyword to the Menai syntax highlighter.
• Resolving a tool approval request (approving, rejecting, or indicating uncertainty) now moves focus to the conversation input box so the user can continue typing immediately.
• Choosing "Open In Editor" from a preview's context menu now opens the editor scrolled to the line that was clicked. Source files map exactly; rendered markdown maps on a best-effort basis using the source line of the block under the cursor.
• Added support for Claude Opus 5.5.
• Added support for GPT 6 Astra, Sol, and Luna.
• Added support for GPT 6.1 Sol.
• Added support for Grok 4.7.
• Removed GPT 5.4 Mini.
• The OpenAI backend now uses the Responses API instead of Chat Completions, enabling tool calling and advanced reasoning on newer OpenAI models.
• Added a feature to create folders and new conversations in the conversation sidebar view.
• Added a feature to create folders and new files in the file sidebar view.
• Ensure the delegate AI tool can only open a child conversation and cannot open any other conversation. This is a sandboxing capability to ensure AIs cannot inadvertently affect histories of other conversations.
• Updated the message editing for conversations. Delete really deletes things, while edit leaves messages below the one being edited faded out to show what will be lost. Edits now take place in the input box so all input features are unified and there's not a second-class edit experience.
• Updated the filesystem AI tool to handle binary files as well as text files, with Menai transforms being able to be applied to both. The tool can now write output to a new file.

Bug fixes:

• Indenting a block of lines in the editor and Markdown text editors no longer shifts the start of the selection when the selection begins at the start of a line. A mid-line selection still tracks the character it started on.
• Restore incomplete conversation and shell inputs immediately on load to avoid the user starting to type over any previous text.
• Removed the stale trace keyword from the Menai syntax highlighter - it is no longer part of the language.
• Fixed a problem where token usage for the usage tab was not updated correctly.
• Fixed a problem where changing provider in the conversation settings did not correctly update model reasoning.
• Hover effects in the sidebar view are now all consistent.
• Fixed the right-to-left rendering for the VCS list view when rendering in Arabic.
• Sending a message to a delegated child AI will now auto-cancel a pending tool request (as already happens with the parent).

Internal structure changes:

• Migrated the Menai transform and transform_file operations off the removed evaluate_raw_with_bindings API. The editor buffer or file content is now supplied as a single inputs dict bound to the program, and transform programs read it with (dict-get inputs "input-text") and (dict-get inputs "input-lines").
• Switched the default log level to INFO, but moved some log messages to INFO and WARNING.
• Created a new conversation_dag module that reasons about the DAG of conversations in a mindspace.

Menai v0.7

Menai v0.7 is a very small update from Thursday's v0.6 release. Its main focus is enabling standard library support for Humbug and adding a couple more standard library modules.

New features:

• The standard library is now packaged with Menai and available in a wheel install. It lives in src/menai/stdlib/ and can be read by an agent with Menai.stdlib_source.
• The module search path is now composed from explicit --module-path directories, the MENAI_PATH environment variable, and the source file's directory.
• Added extract-entry and extract-matches operations to zip-extract.
• Added gzip-compress and gzip-decompress modules to the standard library. gzip-decompress parses and skips the optional FEXTRA, FNAME, and FCOMMENT header fields, and verifies FHCRC when present.
• Added tar-create, tar-entries, and tar-extract modules to the standard library. The readers accept both the POSIX ustar and GNU tar formats, including GNU long names and PAX extended headers.