Releases

Fixed

• Citations for files in folders with spaces in the name are no longer cut short. This could cause a correct answer to be wrongly rejected and re-tried, or in rare cases fall back to a lower-quality answer.

Added

• Faster answers for broad questions. When the search results already thoroughly cover the relevant files, Pica can finalize the answer immediately instead of forcing extra reads.

Added

• Smoother first-run setup flow for choosing an engine, downloading the right model, and adding the first project.
• Improved Mac setup with MLX as the recommended engine and memory-based model recommendations.
• Clearer model download progress, including combined progress for MLX model setup.

Fixed

• Improved reliability around interrupted downloads and app restarts.
• Fixed several setup, onboarding, and model download bugs.

Added

• Faster local generation on Apple Silicon. New optional speculative decoding toggle in Engine settings for the MLX engine — can significantly speed up generation depending on your model and hardware.
• Visible reasoning on MLX, matching what you already see on llama.cpp.
• Pica MCP instruction installer. Adding a project now writes Pica MCP setup instructions into it so other coding agents (Claude, Cursor, etc.) know to use Pica instead of their own raw search. New Fix Project action in the Projects list repairs this if it ever gets out of sync.

Fixed

• MLX engine no longer crashes on startup with the default Gemma 4 E4B model.
• More accurate code search results — search patterns no longer match unrelated substrings inside longer identifiers.
• Faster, less repetitive analysis — avoids redundant work when the same search comes up twice.
• Fixed some code questions about a single file getting stuck instead of returning an answer.

Release 0.1.8