# 🐝 Hive Agent v0.10.3

> Colonies grow up, and Queen DMs learn to listen.

v0.10.0 introduced colonies. v0.10.3 is the release where they stop feeling like a new concept bolted on and start feeling like the place you actually work. Alongside that, Queen DMs got the single biggest fix to single-agent chat since we shipped it: you can keep typing while the queen is thinking, and she'll hear you.

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## The Colony, grown up

When you spawn a colony now, a few things happen that didn't before.

The queen who spawned it hands off cleanly — her session is compacted first, so the new colony doesn't inherit a bloated context and spend its first ten turns figuring out what it already knows. There's a short **incubating phase** between "spawn requested" and "colony live" where skills, storage, and scheduler tools get set up quietly in the background. By the time the colony is ready, it has its own scoped skill bundle and SQLite — no more cross-colony skill leakage, no more workers belonging to the wrong group.

The UI finally matches the model. The sidebar groups everything by colony with a DataGrid view, shows the active queen on a dedicated bar inside the colony, and lets you click a worker to open it as its own tab. Tables and workers are scoped to the colony you're looking at, which sounds obvious in hindsight and was a long-standing source of confusion. Queen identity — name, title, avatar — now travels with the queen into message bubbles, the profile pane, and the org chart, so it's consistent no matter where you see her.

If you were using colonies in v0.10.1 or v0.10.2, this release is the one where the experience stops fighting you.

## Queen DMs stop eating your keystrokes

The most common complaint about Queen DMs was simple: if the queen was mid-turn and you thought of something to add, your message either got lost or arrived at a weird moment. That's gone.

Messages you send while the queen is working now land in a **pending queue**, visible in the chat panel with a **Steer** or **Cancel** control. Steer folds your message into the turn in progress; Cancel drops it. When the queue auto-flushes, the "typing…" indicator no longer flickers, and the old bootstrap race that sometimes rendered your own message twice is fixed.

The queen also got a proper `ask_user` tool this release, so when she genuinely needs something from you, it shows up as a question — not as a regular chat message you have to parse as one. Tool calls in chat are grouped by session now, so a chatty worker doesn't drown out the queen's own thinking, and her avatar is on every bubble so you can tell who's talking at a glance.

## Smaller things worth knowing

- **Prometheus tool** for querying metrics from agents (#7047).
- **Scheduler + triggers** got a UI pass, better reliability on trigger message delivery, and scheduler tools are now available during the incubating phase.
- **VSCode extension** bumped to 1.0.1 with refreshed icons and a fix for frame-resize jank.
- **Model catalog** updates for Xiaomi and OpenRouter selections.
- **Runtime reliability:** cancelled executions now fully terminate before a session can restart (#7001), Codex `store=False` is honored correctly (#7089), and the UI handles a broken Aden API key gracefully instead of hanging.

## Upgrading from v0.10.2

No migration. Pull `main` at `v0.10.3` and restart Hive — your existing `~/.hive/` profiles, queens, colonies, and sessions keep working.

One thing to be aware of: worker and table tabs are now scoped per colony. If you expected them to be global, switch colonies in the sidebar to see each colony's own.
