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October 20th, 2026

Jan v0.8.7: Shell Switch, Image Size Limit, Project Threads & Agent Subagents

A minor update to v0.8.6

v0.8.7 collects fixes reported since v0.8.6, adds two chat settings, and brings a round of improvements to the Jan agent and CLI. Your data and settings carry over; one MCP clean-up runs on first launch (see below).

New

Turn the shell tool off in chat.

The chat input's tool menu now has a Shell switch. Turned off, the model is no longer given the shell tool or its instructions, while web search, fetch and your MCP tools keep working. It is on by default, and it appears when the shell can run sandboxed and the model supports tools. (#9222 (opens in a new tab))

A separate size limit for images.

Settings > Attachments has a new Max Image Size (MB), next to the document limit it was easy to confuse with. It defaults to 10 MB, as before, and accepts 1 to 100. (#9312 (opens in a new tab))

Built-in subagents for the Jan agent.

The agent ships with explore, research, review and debug subagents, each of which can use its own model. The explore subagent is read-only by default. (#9261 (opens in a new tab))

Fixes

A thread left its project when you attached a document.

Once the document was processed, the thread moved out of its project, and stayed out after a restart. It now stays in its project. Thanks to @enkynakamura (opens in a new tab) for the fix. (#9197 (opens in a new tab))

Pasted code with @ lost its decorators.

Every @word was treated as a file reference, so pasting Python with @dataclass or @app.route removed the decorators and flattened the indentation. Only an @ followed by a real file or folder is now treated as a reference; everything else is sent as you typed it. (#9291 (opens in a new tab))

Stop now ends the whole turn.

Pressing Stop while a tool was running or waiting for your approval could leave the turn going. It now ends the turn, including the tool. (#9241 (opens in a new tab))

A web page read by the built-in fetch tool is kept within the model's context window, so a long page no longer overflows a local model. (#9283 (opens in a new tab))

Chat with a local model failed behind a proxy or VPN.

Requests from Jan to its own local engine could be sent to a system proxy and fail although the engine was running. They now always go direct; remote providers still use your proxy. (#9182 (opens in a new tab))

The hosted Exa MCP server is removed from existing installs.

v0.8.3 added a hosted Exa server to the default MCP list. On first launch, v0.8.7 removes that default entry. Servers you added, and an Exa entry you configured with your own key, are kept. (#9010 (opens in a new tab))

Windows: a ^ in a command name could get past shell permissions.

cmd ignores ^ in a command name, so cm^d runs cmd. Such a command now always asks for approval. (#9315 (opens in a new tab))

macOS now says why Jan asks for Local Network access, needed to reach a model server on another machine, such as Ollama on your network. (#9318 (opens in a new tab))

Jan agent and CLI

Also

  • On NVIDIA GPUs, the engine logs the driver version at start, and a crash caused by a driver too old for the engine says to update the driver.
  • A model download stopped by a network error says why in more cases (#9294 (opens in a new tab)), and a failed model-list fetch records the address it could not reach in the app log (#9292 (opens in a new tab)).
  • The sidebar's Jan label is back on Windows and Linux (#9242 (opens in a new tab)).

Known issues

  • With Shell turned off, a model that calls the shell anyway ends its reply instead of continuing without it (#9319 (opens in a new tab)).
  • Auto compact needs Max Context Tokens set for remote models; Jan does not detect a remote model's context window yet (#9317 (opens in a new tab)).
  • Local models do not run on Intel Macs, as in v0.8.5.