In the six days since our last note, we shipped to production 34 times, including the three biggest releases in DevStride's history and 145 further improvements and fixes besides. Here are the highlights!
This is the most exciting thing we have ever shipped! DevStride now has an AI agent built right into the product, and it does far more than answer questions: it takes action, as you, inside your workspace.
Ask it how DevStride works and it answers from our documentation, linking the pages it used. Ask about your work and it reads your items, boards, tickets and articles, seeing only what you can see. Then put it to work:
Every change it proposes appears on a card showing exactly what will change, and nothing happens until you press Approve. Turn on Auto mode and routine edits simply happen, while deletes, archives and sharing changes always ask. Each change lands in the item's Activity as yours, marked via AI Assistant.
The assistant is for people who want to work directly in DevStride. If you would rather bring your own agent, Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or Codex, the MCP server connection gives it the same reach and even more power, now at Settings → AI Assistants → Connect AI. Admins switch the assistant on at Settings → AI Assistants.
A free preview, for now. We are releasing the assistant as a free preview on OpenAI's Luna model for a short time, to gather your feedback. Later we will charge for the tokens it uses and let you choose more powerful, and more costly, models. Tell us what you ask it, and what you wish it could do.
📚 AI Assistant · Working with your workspace · MCP server
Register an HTTPS endpoint at Settings → Webhooks and DevStride sends a signed JSON event the moment something happens. We broadcast five events today: item.created, item.status_changed, comment.created, sla.at_risk and sla.breached. Deliveries arrive in order with retries, every attempt is logged, and failed ones can be replayed. More events are coming, and we can add new ones quickly on request.
Together with the API, webhooks let you build standalone interfaces of your own. Picture a fully self-built, self-hosted service desk UI, branded entirely as yours for your customers, while DevStride's backend, SLAs and automations do the work underneath.
📚 Webhooks · Quickstart
We leaned into smoother animations and a gentle rainbow palette in honour of the new embedded AI: anything that calls on AI carries a slowly moving rainbow, so you always know when a model is listening. The dialog you are working in glows in its own colour while the page dims behind it. The sidebar has thin line icons, and each area's colour follows you onto the page, its tabs and buttons. All eight themes are supported, and dark mode looks incredible on the new look.
Also in this refresh: the item drawer glows like a dialog and its fields lose their boxes until hovered; tables read calmer; item numbers take their item's colour; thinner ring charts; one loader everywhere; sign-in and sign-up share one redesigned screen. Request an Item now sits in the sidebar's Help section, and Connect AI moved to Settings → AI Assistants.
A template holding a departed member or a removed tag now shows Needs review instead of being blocked. Applying it offers Fix the template or Apply and skip missing values, and Save as Template lists what it left out. Automations gain Apply Template and Archive Item actions.
📚 Applying a template · Automations
📚 Customizing the item drawer · Subtask statuses
Requiring single sign-on applies per organization, so a contractor keeps their password elsewhere, and turning a method off signs members out within seconds. Sign-up and reset codes now come from devstride.com, and an expired 2-step code sends you back to sign in.
For the engineers who build DevStride, and anyone running our Claude Code plugin, this week's releases finished two things we have been working toward all year.
A Mac becomes a DevStride development machine from one pasted line. ./setup installs Homebrew, the GitHub CLI and every tool the repository pins, clones the code, builds the machine its own AWS stage, loads the demo data, signs Claude Code and Codex in with the plugin and its hooks, and ends with one word: READY. It stops only where a person must type a password or approve an install. It now finishes unassisted on an agent machine too: ./setup --agent <name> enrols an unattended agent with a certificate-backed identity, a machine that is both agent and workstation answers both, Codex is installed from Homebrew and kept current, and --dry-run previews every step first. On the admin's side, ds team add-developer gives a new developer GitHub access, an AWS sign-in and a DevStride workspace invitation in one command, and --role admin gives a new admin everything the owner has.
The DevStride plugin for Claude Code reaches 3.10.0. A story is now marked Done when its epic's release reaches the target branch, not when it merges onto the epic's integration branch, so a board never shows an epic as finished while its release is still in review. Minor review findings are dismissed with a reason instead of being filed as deferred work. A new mergedStatusName setting names the "merged, awaiting release" status. The README now opens with how the loop works and why. And in our own repository, the review loop runs on two local engines, Claude and Codex, at every merge boundary, with cloud CI running exactly once after.