Stuurman is an early preview. Each release has a version such as v0.4.0; stuurman version prints the one you run, and Stopping, backing up, upgrading says how to move to a newer one. Back up before you upgrade.

Jump to v0.4.0, v0.3.0, v0.2.0 or v0.1.0.

v0.4.0 13 October 2026

Software for the crew, limits a crew member can ask for, a Developer menu with a text editor, and crew members who notice each other.

Software for the crew

• A crew member can ask for programs it needs, such as a compiler or a database tool. The Ship installs them from a store of its own, and the crew member has them from its next turn. Nothing it installs can replace a program that the crew image brings.
• The First Mate decides on its own only when a package is free, ready-made, small enough and not blocked. Anything else comes to you as an approval, and you can refuse it or block it for good.
• The Crew page has a Software panel for each crew member: add or drop a package, see what is installed, and see what is blocked and lift a block.
• A role can come with software. The Builder, for example, signs on with Go, Make and a C compiler, and you can change the list on the Sign on form.
• One setting, the package set, fixes the version in which every package is looked up, so two crew members asking for the same package get the same one. Moving it changes nothing by itself. The First Mate is told which crew members are behind, and you can bring one up to date from the Crew page.
• Each crew member also has a folder of its own for tools it installs itself. The Crew page shows what is in it and can clear it. The First Mate is told, once, when a crew member installs a runtime or compiler that the store could have given it.
• The store is tidied every night: what no crew member uses any longer is removed.
• The Ship needs three more web hosts to fetch packages: github.com, codeload.github.com and cache.nixos.org. If you blocked one of them on the Hosts page, a lookup says which.
• stuurman doctor has a line for software and one for the crew's folders.

See Extensions and software for how it works.

Limits for each crew member

• The Crew page has a Limits form for memory, processors, processes and the size of the home folder. A change applies from the crew member's next turn. The defaults are what every crew member had before.
• A crew member can ask for other limits. The First Mate decides alone when nothing goes beyond the Ship's ceiling; anything else comes to you. The ceiling is on the Settings page.
• stuurman doctor warns when the crew members who can be on watch at once could ask for more memory than the machine has.

Crew members who notice each other

• A crew member's message that mentions no one is now heard by the crew members who follow its thread, or by the crew of its channel. They answer only if they have something to add.
• Hearing is limited, so a channel does not run away with itself: a pause between turns, a budget until a person speaks, and the Ship's caps on turns and wake-ups. By default the turn cap is now 12 and the wake-ups an hour 90; a Ship that saved its own values keeps them.
• A crew member who joins a channel late is woken by earlier mentions of it, as it already was by yours.

The Bridge

• Today's watch shows what is planned: dashed marks to the right of now for a crew member's night watch, its tasks and its scheduled messages.
• SOUL.md, crew.yaml and skills are written in a text editor that colours Markdown and YAML, in both themes.
• With developer features on, a Developer menu holds the Database page and two new ones. Ship's files opens the files of the Ship and of each cabin in the editor. Cabin files walks a crew member's cabin, says which files go to the Ship's repository, and deletes or uploads files. Every save, delete and upload is checked, kept and entered in the ship's log.
• The Settings page now holds the Ship's repository and Slack, which moved from the Overview.

Upgrading from v0.3.0

• Run stuurman upgrade. It pulls three images now (the new one builds software) and restarts the Ship. The first start makes the Ship's store and fills it, about 0.8 GiB, so it takes longer than usual.
• Nothing of a cabin, a SOUL.md or a setting is rewritten. A crew member has no software until it asks for some or you add some.

v0.3.0 12 October 2026

Signing on from a library of roles and personalities, and a port of its own for the Bridge.

A library to sign on from

• The Sign on form on the Crew page has a Role and a Personality. There are 24 typical roles in six groups, and each has a personality that fits it and seven others, some that suit the work and some that, on purpose, do not: 192 in all. Choosing one fills in the function, the skills and the SOUL.md, which stay yours to change.
• A personality changes how a crew member writes, never how well it works or what it may do.
• The First Mate can sign crew on from the library too, and an approval says when a sign-on came from it.
• No SOUL.md that exists is rewritten; the library is for sign-ons from now on.

A port of its own

• The first Ship's Bridge is now on port 43560 (before: 8080). Each further Ship takes the first free port after it, up to 43659, so a hundred Ships fit. --port gives another.

Upgrading from v0.2.0

• A Ship whose .env has no STUURMAN_PORT line was on port 8080, and its address and passkey are for that port. Add STUURMAN_PORT=8080 to its .env before you upgrade and nothing moves. Without the line, the Bridge is published on the new port while the Ship's address still says 8080.

v0.2.0 12 October 2026

The first usable release. Someone who has never seen Stuurman can install it with one line, connect Slack, sign on the First Mate and talk to it.

Installing, and several Ships

• One line installs Stuurman, or Homebrew does. The stuurman command works on macOS and Linux, on amd64 and arm64, checks its download against its SHA-256, and never runs sudo. See Install and commands.
• stuurman install makes a Ship: it asks for a name, gives it an ID such as brave-heron, writes its folder and starts it. start, stop, status, logs, doctor, upgrade and version follow.
• Several Ships can run on one machine, each with its own folder, data, key, port, crew and Slack apps. stuurman list shows them and --ship says which one a command acts on. All stop on one leaves the others underway.
• stuurman upgrade moves a Ship to the latest release and refuses while a turn is running unless you say --now.

The crew

• Each crew member is a Claude Code session in a container of its own, with its own cabin. The First Mate comes built in.
• Hail a crew member from the Bridge, or mention it in Slack, and it answers where you wrote. Crew members may stay silent when a message is not for them, and several short messages in a row get one answer.
• Every crew member has a signal flag, a real International Code of Signals flag, shown beside its name and drawn as the picture of its Slack app.
• The crew pauses by itself when Claude's usage limit is reached or Claude cannot be reached, says so once, and carries on when it can.
• The Ship has a Git repository. A crew member saves its cabin to it, and you can push it to a private repository of your own on GitHub every night. Nothing that looks like a secret is ever committed or pushed.

Time and memory

• Crew members keep recurring and one-off tasks in a file of their own, and the Ship starts a turn when one falls due.
• Each night the night watch folds a crew member's day into its notes, and its logbook is archived monthly. You can run a night watch on demand from the Hail page. See Tasks and the night watch.

Slack

• The Ship makes its own Slack app, and one for each crew member, from manifests. You press Allow and paste a token for each. Slack connects out to the Ship, so nothing is exposed to the internet.
• Crew members send and receive files, and make, invite to, rename, describe, leave and (after asking you) archive public channels. They can schedule messages, pin, bookmark and write canvases, and read a channel they are in.
• All stop and underway work from Slack, for the Captain only.
• The First Mate proposes signing crew on and off and changes to who a crew member is; you answer in #bridge or on the Bridge.

The Bridge and the Settings page

• A new look, with a light and a dark theme. The order telegraph in the top bar shows the Ship's state on every page, and all stop is one press.
• Pages for the Crew, Hail, Hosts, Approvals, the ship's log and Settings. You can sign crew on and off and edit a crew member's SOUL.md and crew.yaml yourself, and edit a sign-on or a change before you approve it.
• Settings holds the Ship's name and time zone, the night watch time, the disk space to keep free, the turn cap, the wake-ups an hour, and how long the ship's log is kept.
• Developer features are off until you turn them on with your passkey. They add a Database page for changing the Ship's database directly.
• Crew members write more like people: short messages, the answer first.

The safe

• The Safe page holds secrets for the crew's work. A value is stored encrypted and never shown again, to anyone.
• You grant a crew member the use of a secret for a time, and revoke it when you like. Crew members can ask, and the First Mate can review the request.
• A crew member uses a secret without ever holding it. It gets a stand-in; when a call goes to the host you chose, the Ship swaps in the real value, and blanks it in the answer. See The safe.

Extensions

• The Ship keeps one list of extensions (skills, plugins and MCP servers), and each crew member has its own set of the allowed ones. Claude Code in a crew member's container knows no other.
• Add an extension from Anthropic's plugin marketplace, write a skill yourself, or add one from a GitHub address. A crew member can ask for one that is not on the list; the Ship fetches it, reads what it brings, and the First Mate or you decide.
• The Ship has a marketplace of its own, kept in its repository.
• An MCP server can be reached at an https address and signed in with a secret of the safe, which the crew member never sees. See Extensions and software.

Safety

• All stop halts the Ship and removes every crew container. It needs neither the Claude token, nor Slack, nor the database, and works from the Bridge, from Slack and from the command line.
• Crew containers have no direct way out. Web access goes through the Ship's gateway: allowed by default, always logged, with private and metadata addresses always blocked and paste sites held for you.
• The Claude token and the Slack tokens are kept encrypted and never reach a crew member.
• No turn starts when the disk is nearly full.

Running for years

• The ship's log no longer grows without end. Once a day old entries are archived and removed: request entries after 90 days and others after 730, both settable.
• The Overview and stuurman doctor say how much the Ship holds.

Upgrading from v0.1.0

• Back up .env and data/. Install the stuurman command, record the Ship with stuurman adopt <its folder>, make sure no crew member is working, and run stuurman upgrade --now. A Ship of v0.1.0 cannot say whether a turn is running, so the upgrade needs --now.
• Every Captain signs in once more, because the Bridge's cookies are now named by the Bridge's port.
• Set the time zone on the Settings page. Until then the Ship uses UTC.
• A plugin that a crew member installed by itself stops loading. The Ship's list of extensions starts empty: add what the crew should have.
• The Ship's repository on GitHub is optional. Nothing is pushed until you save an address.

v0.1.0 4 October 2026

The first release, and a skeleton: the Helm with its database, secret store and ship's log; the Bridge with passkey sign-in; all stop and underway from the Bridge and the command line; and the first fitting out of the Ship, which stores the Claude token. It ran with Docker Compose.