Wikilinks and backlinks in Documents.
Type [[document name]] in any Document and Council builds the link, then surfaces backlinks on the other side. The document graph fills in as you write.
April 2026
April 27, 2026
Documents got the Obsidian treatment.
Callouts, highlights, accent carets, prose typography, cleaner canvas. Markdown that feels like a real writing surface, not a chat output.
ChatGPT timestamps stay stable across syncs.
A migration heals corrupted update times and the sync no longer bumps a conversation’s timestamp on every list refresh. Threads stop rearranging themselves for no reason.
April 26, 2026
Council is live on the Chrome Web Store.
v0.2.2 of the Council extension shipped to the Chrome Web Store. One-click install, no developer mode required. Install Council.
Promote a conversation to a chain.
When a one-off chat is starting to look like a workflow, one click graduates it into an editable chain — with the prompts, model selections, and step structure preserved.
Delta briefs fire automatically when you refresh.
Refresh a Document and Council shows what changed since the last version inline at the top — no extra step, no separate report to open.
April 25, 2026
Documents.
A new artifact for living research output. Stitch sources together, version on refresh, share, email, or publish to a public viewer. The destination for chain runs that should outlive their conversation.
Edit as document, from any chain run.
The chain runner result toolbar gets an “Edit as document” CTA that converts the run into a Document you can keep iterating on without losing the original.
Document versioning + refresh.
Documents version themselves on refresh, with delta briefs surfacing what changed between runs. Living briefs without manual diffing.
April 24, 2026
Chain runner, redesigned.
Three-pane layout: setup on the left, steps in the center, historical runs in a right rail. Chains open in the runner first — edit is one click away when you need it.
Dry-run a chain before you spend tokens on it.
Validate the structure of a chain end-to-end against a fast model before paying for the real run. Catches broken steps and bad templates without burning the budget.
Step-level assertions.
Add expectations to any step. The chain fails fast if an output doesn’t meet the bar — instead of cascading garbage into the next step.
Retry a step with a different model.
When one model fails or produces something off, retry just that step against a different provider — without rerunning the whole chain.
Chains run independent steps in parallel.
Stages with no dependency between them now execute concurrently. Serial dependencies still wait their turn. Faster runs, same outputs.
Citations and URL verification in chain runs.
Chain outputs extract citations from markdown links and verify URLs end-to-end. Inline citation spans get synthesized on the fly; dead links get flagged.
5-step onboarding wizard, with replay.
New users get a guided tour of conversations, chains, profiles, and schedules. You can replay it any time from settings if you want a refresher.
April 23, 2026
Anthropic web search, inside chains.
Chain steps using Claude can hit live web search natively. Sources show up alongside the output, not in a separate tool tab.
Backend security hardening.
A full audit pass: HttpOnly cookie auth, route-level authorization fixes, double-submit protection on admin actions, billing idempotency, sync error handling, schema tightening. Quiet but load-bearing.
April 22, 2026
ChatGPT sync moved to GraphQL.
The extension fetches your ChatGPT conversation list via the GraphQL endpoint instead of scraping. Faster, more reliable, and survives ChatGPT UI changes.
April 20, 2026
Re-run a chain from any saved step.
Re-runs hydrate variables and propagate prior step context to the model, so you can retry one piece without rebuilding state from scratch.
Run a single chain step on demand.
Per-step run buttons in both the chain editor and the runner. Test one prompt in isolation while you’re building, or re-run just one step from a finished report.
The composer fits the phone now.
Action buttons wrap gracefully at narrow widths instead of clipping.
Notes stay with you between conversations.
The notes panel now lives at the workspace level and autosaves, so it survives thread jumps.
Keyboard nav for long chain reports.
Floating scroll controls plus j/k/Home/End to fly through long outputs.
Fewer knobs on the composer.
Tone and style dropdowns are gone. Nobody used them.
April 19, 2026
Council runs on your phone.
First pass at mobile responsiveness: the sidebar and report TOC become drawers below 900px, safe-area insets respect the notch, and most app surfaces work at 375px-width. File a note if something feels off.
April 17, 2026
joincouncil.app is live.
Public landing page with pricing, early-access flow, and this changelog — domain, DNS, and SSL came up in a single afternoon.
Your sync tokens are encrypted at rest.
Provider access tokens now stored encrypted on our servers; privacy policy is live at /privacy.
Council Mode survives a refresh.
Side-by-side layout state now persists across reloads.
Sync is quieter when there’s nothing to say.
The sync toast now only appears for real changes or errors.
April 12, 2026
Turn any response into an artifact.
Chat responses worth keeping auto-file as artifacts you can reference, re-run, or drop into a chain.
Read long reports like documents.
Continuous-scroll report reader with a TOC sidebar — jump sections, keep your place.
GPT profiles are editable.
Click the gear on any profile row to edit name, instructions, or model.
Scheduled runs can stop themselves.
Schedules now take a start date, end date, and max-run count.
April 11, 2026
ChatGPT threads reconstruct cleanly.
Filter tool-use noise at the API layer and sort by createdAt — out-of-order threads and weird gaps are gone.
April 10, 2026
Your ChatGPT GPTs become Council profiles.
Synced GPTs show up as profiles you can run against Claude, Gemini, or back to GPT — one mental model, all providers.
One chain-editor header.
Open Runner, Cancel, and Save unified into a single bar.
Delete a chain report, with confirmation.
Reports can be deleted from the runner behind a confirmation modal.
April 9, 2026
We validate your API keys before saving.
Paste a key and Council checks it against the provider before storing — bad keys surface immediately.
Scheduled runs can’t loop forever.
An incident last week: a failed scheduled chain retried itself for hours, burning API tokens. We shipped a same-day fix, then hardened the whole execution path with a circuit breaker and per-run token tracking. Runaway jobs now stop themselves before they cost you.
Delete your account yourself.
Settings has a danger zone — no emails to support required.
An admin panel so we can run a real alpha.
Internal tools for user management, promo codes, system stats, and analytics — not user-facing, but why we respond to bug reports faster.
April 6, 2026
Schedules get a proper detail view.
Click any schedule for full run history, cron editing, pause, and one-shot “schedule ahead” runs.
April 5, 2026
Star and organize your profiles.
Profiles can be favorited and moved into folders.
April 3, 2026
Images move to R2.
Conversation images now live in Cloudflare R2 with automatic backfill — no more missing gallery after a deploy.
Gemini 3.1 model IDs.
Updated from gemini-2.x to the gemini-3.1-* family, with flash-lite-preview as the default.
April 1, 2026
Alpha launch week.
The cluster of changes that got Council ready for real users, shipped in the same week: full-text search across every conversation (Postgres GIN, ranked, highlighted snippets), a first-run onboarding flow, a full accessibility pass (ARIA, focus traps, keyboard nav end-to-end), five critical security patches, and proper error states for expired provider sessions instead of silent failures.
March 2026
March 30, 2026
Sync moves to the server.
Self-healing sync engine moves server-side, calling the extension only when it needs a provider-bound browser context — no more service-worker flakiness.
Sync status dashboard.
Settings shows live sync state across providers — last sync, failures, counts, plus a Sync Now button.
March 29, 2026
A unified Artifacts system.
ChatGPT Canvas and Claude Artifacts captured into one searchable library with inline rendering, folders, and move-to actions.
Gemini sync parity.
Gemini joins ChatGPT and Claude as first-class — conversations, branches, gems, images, and code-execution results all sync.
March 27, 2026
Reports with drift alerts.
The reporting engine hit feature-complete: scheduled chains produce dated reports stored server-side, with a viewer, side-by-side diff, cosine-similarity drift detection, and master documents that bundle related runs. The thing that made us realize Council was actually an MLOps tool for humans.
March 26, 2026
Projects and a knowledge base.
Projects got a real home: detail view, scoped system prompts, knowledge sources with PDF and URL extraction, templates, and auto-grounding when sources are attached. MLA citations, because researchers asked.
March 25, 2026
Drift detection lands.
Re-run the same chain twice and Council tells you what changed, with side-by-side diff and alerts on every run.
March 23, 2026
Private alpha opens.
Chrome extension hits the Web Store, the web app goes live on Railway, and the first ten testers get invite emails.
March 20, 2026
Single-container deploy.
Docker image, single-container architecture, periodic sync polling, incremental message fetch.
Conversation branching works.
Edited messages and regenerated responses track their parent correctly; branch navigation is one click.
March 19, 2026
Prompt workbench and scheduled runs.
Two-column workbench for building and testing prompts, scheduled chain execution, and the first pass at drift detection on outputs.
Gallery image detail view.
Click any image to see it full-size with source conversation and metadata.
March 18, 2026
Four-zone layout and the chain editor.
New sidebar with a persistent icon bar, inline folder panel, and a dedicated chain-editor view for multi-step prompts.
March 17, 2026
File attachments.
Upload, download, and inline-render files inside conversations.
March 16, 2026
Full content extraction across providers.
Images, tool outputs, code-execution results, and Claude artifacts all captured from streaming responses and rendered inline.
Session auth, rate limiting, CORS hardening.
Cookie-based session auth, request rate limits, and CORS tightened ahead of any external access.
March 15, 2026
The week Council became Council.
A single day that turned a chat UI into a product: background sync daemon pulling ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini conversations into one app; Council Mode for side-by-side model comparison; prompt chains with smart steps and template variables; conversation branching and keyboard navigation; unified Profiles page covering GPTs and projects; time-grouped sidebar with folder CRUD and color picker; gallery, search, markdown rendering, palette, speech, and export. 165 passing tests landed the same day.
March 14, 2026
Web UI, streaming, multi-LLM chat.
First web client, streaming responses, multi-provider chat, and a Docker build that could deploy anywhere.
March 11, 2026
Initial.
First commit.
What you’re reading is the curated view. Three months, ~300 commits, ~100,000 lines of code. The small fixes, the dead ends, and the “wait why doesn’t this work” commits aren’t here — but they got us here too.