Nanocoder 1.26.1 is out - we added a lot 🔥
Hey everyone! Will here.
We've just released Nanocoder 1.26.0 and it's a big one - possibly our largest yet with not only many awesome new features but large reworks under the hood to make it even stronger in certain areas. It's also our most diverse release with over 10 contributors coming together to make it possible. Having so many people joining the collective and building truly open AI is beyond amazing and I can't thank people enough! 🔥
Anyway, within Nanocoder, here is what we have added:
Nano mode is the big one for this release. If you have been running Nanocoder with a small open-weights model on modest hardware, you know the system prompt overhead can eat a meaningful chunk of your context window before the model says anything useful. Nano mode drops that overhead from roughly 500-700 tokens down to 150-250 tokens. It is a third profile in /tune, alongside the existing full and minimal profiles. It disables find_files, list_directory, and agent; cuts the section lengths down; and ships with a low-end hardware preset.
Reasoning traces are new. Models that emit reasoning content, such as Codex GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1-style, or Anthropic extended thinking, now have that content stream in real time as a collapsible Thought block above the response. It persists in history and appears in logs. Toggle it with Control+R. The Display Settings panel under /settings controls the default expansion state.
Non-interactive mode now has a --plain flag. This strips the Ink rendering layer entirely so output is clean for CI pipelines, scripts, and pipes. Exit codes are deterministic, stdin/stdout are handled properly, and there are no interactive prompts.
We also reworked the VS Code extension. The old "Ask Nanocoder" command is gone, replaced with a more natural context-on-focus flow. There is a /rename command for chat sessions, a defaultMode config option, custom system prompt support, per-model context window overrides, a disabledTools option, JSON tool fallback for open-weights models (Qwen, Kimi, GLM), <function=...> format support, and a new Display Settings panel. Plus 12+ new themes.
Full changelog on GitHub: https://github.com/Nano-Collective/nanocoder
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Within the collective we're also gearing up for more growth, building a mission behind truly open AI that is built by the community for the community is an imperative one and we're putting a lot of groundwork into growing an organisation for everyone that serves this.
We've recently finished our collective docs which share a little more behind the brand: https://docs.nanocollective.org/collective
If you want to get involved check out our GitHub:
https://github.com/Nano-Collective
And join our Discord: