Launching Chats in stagewise

We feel this was long overdue, and while we wish we could have made this announcement sooner, we're thrilled to say:

Today, we're happy to release the next big feature for stagewise: Chats!

Your partner for frontend development

Our goal with Chats was not just to give you the much-needed chat history you've all longed for.

We wanted to make sure that stagewise remains as simple as it was while making the experience even better.

To achieve this, we made sure to follow these principles:

• Absolute minimalism: stagewise is the tool; your website is the canvas. We don't want our UI to distract you.
• Engaging communication: We made the agent ask smart questions that keep you in the loop.
• No yapping: Nobody reads long AI-generated messages. Our agent communicates with you through short, meaningful messages.
• Approachability: Chats have a simple UI that reminds you of classic messenger apps. UI elements are in places you naturally expect them to be.

Addressing long requested features

Talking to many of you, we heard certain things come up repeatedly:

• ✅ Chat history: See previous messages.
• ✅ Aborting: Stop the agent at any time you like.
• ⚙️ Undo: Revert the codebase to a certain point in time. (coming soon!)

We're working hard to cover all these requests in our product in a way that keeps stagewise as easy to use as it is - and we have way more features in our pipeline that we're even more excited about!

Technical challenges

This release was delayed by a few days because we faced a few technical challenges that required us to make some changes under the hood.

Part of these changes is the launch of a new communication mechanism between the CLI and Browser - we call it Karton 📦.

It's only used for the non-bridged toolbar (stagewise Agent mode) right now due to its experimental nature, but it's already part of our open source repository, and we're excited to see other developers in the community benefit from this new solution as well. A more technical deep-dive on Karton will follow soon.

If you're a regular user of stagewise, this change should not be noticeable to you, but it helps us move forward with new features much faster.

What's next?

In the upcoming days and weeks, we will focus on two things: the much-requested Undo feature and fine-tuning both the UI and agent behavior. We're excited that stagewise is now in a place where we can ship small, incremental changes to a solid foundation.

How to get started

If you're a new user, start using stagewise by opening a terminal in your app's directory and simply calling npx stagewise@latest (or pnpm dlx stagewise@latest if you use pnpm). You will receive free credits, and with the code CHATWISE, new users get 80% off for the first month 🎉

Existing users should simply make sure to start the latest version of stagewise in their terminals (npx stagewise@latest) and that should be it!

Got feedback?

Feel free to join our Discord community where we're having regular hangouts and chats with all of you.

If you have feedback, questionds or issue, join in and tell us about it!