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v2.21.0 — the things that were reported as working and were not

Released 2026-08-15. Upgrade:

sudo snap refresh yazses     # snap
pipx upgrade yazses          # or: uv tool upgrade yazses

Sixty-nine commits had built up behind v2.20.0. Read back across them, they share a theme worth naming: almost every one is a thing that reported success and was not succeeding. A green check mark, a passing guard, a tray icon, an "Update installed" message — each of them true-looking and wrong.

That is a harder failure than a crash, because nothing asks to be looked at.

Guards that passed by checking nothing

Three packaging guards iterated a collection and asserted on each element. The collection was empty. A for loop over nothing raises no error and reports success, so all three had been green since the day the files they globbed moved — proving, in effect, that no rule was broken because no rule was checked.

The same shape turned up twice more: the CLI-reference guard read 58 command names and never opened a command group, leaving roughly 50 subcommands unchecked (TyperGroup is not a click.Group under Click 8.4, so an isinstance walk finds nothing and passes), and eleven tests behind an optional extra were skipped in every CI job — a skip is not a failure, so nothing ever said so.

There is now a test that fails when a guard would pass on an empty set, which makes the class of bug mechanical rather than a thing to remember.

A crashed daemon stayed dead on Windows and macOS

Linux had Restart=on-failure through its systemd user unit. Windows and macOS had nothing: if the daemon died, it stayed dead, dictation silently stopped working, and the tray icon — which polls the daemon — went on being drawn. The supervisor now re-checks liveness from the tray lock and relaunches, bounded at five attempts.

yazses features now says what a capability costs

The catalogue listed 145 capabilities and the price of none of them. The number existed — features enable has printed it since ADR-018 — but only once the download had started, which is after the decision rather than before it.

$ yazses features
│  ○ off  Cocktail Filter (voice focus)    cocktail         ~3.1 GB   experimental
│  ○ off  Glance-Type (camera)             gaze             ~219 MB   experimental
│  ○ off  Dictation Reflow                 reflow                     optional

Three capabilities resolve to ~3.1 GB apiece, because speechbrain pulls PyTorch and the CUDA stack behind a name that reads like a small audio filter. A blank cell means nothing to download, which is true of most of them.

New guide: Install only what you need.

Also in this release

  • The Command Safety Gate is wired — a misheard rm -rf now waits for a spoken confirm instead of being typed.
  • Check digits on dictated numbers — a card or ISBN whose check digit fails is held rather than typed, through the same confirm gate, so there is one release phrase to learn rather than one per guard.
  • The tray shows whether the microphone is hearing you — a live input-level ring with a notch at the silence gate. The five state colours all say what YazSes is doing; none said whether audio was arriving, and those come apart exactly when it matters.
  • An Intel macOS build, and .dmg filenames that name their architecture.
  • Settings-window secondary text now passes WCAG AA — it was #808080, which measures 3.43:1 on Qt's light theme and 3.44:1 on its dark one, against the 4.5:1 AA requires. It failed on both.
  • Windows installs are no longer told to update with pip — choco, winget and scoop each get the command that actually works for them.
  • An opt-in release check (off by default) that tells you once when a new version lands.
  • Streaming transcription is measured as a loss on every model but tiny.en, and features enable now says so instead of recommending it.

Fixed

  • A CI job that could only ever be red, for weeks.
  • uv.lock still recorded the project as 2.18.2 after two releases had shipped.
  • PyPI was told YazSes supports two Python versions; CI proves four.
  • The benchmarks page told readers to run a harness that was not in the repository.
  • The Flathub listing had no screenshots, and nothing in the repo read that file.
  • "Update installed" was reported for upgrades that never happened — uv tool upgrade exits 0 on a pinned install.

The full list is in the changelog.