VibePod CLI 0.18: Tau agent, local skills, and Podman auto-detect

2026-07-26 · Release · CLI · Agents

Tau joins the agent matrix

Tau is Hugging Face's minimalist, Pi-inspired terminal coding agent. It is the first Python-based agent VibePod ships, so the image is built on python:3.12-slim instead of Node. Start it with the full name or the new vp t shortcut:

vp run tau
vp t
vp run tau -- -p "explain this repo"

Credentials, provider preferences, the model catalog, and session history are persisted to ~/.config/vibepod/agents/tau/ on your host and mounted so Tau sees them as ~/.tau/. Authenticate once with Tau's /login flow — OpenAI, Anthropic, the OpenAI Codex subscription, OpenRouter, Hugging Face, and custom OpenAI-compatible endpoints are all supported — and the credentials survive container restarts. API keys can also be injected through agents.tau.env or -e.

Tau also reads skills from ~/.agents/skills/, so anything installed with vp skills is available to it, and its print mode works in task mode via vp task create tau "…".

Skills install from local files and directories

Skills no longer have to come from a remote locator. Point vp skills add at a path on disk and VibePod installs it into the selected scope, which shortens the loop when you are writing a skill instead of consuming one.

vp skills add ./my-skill
vp skills add ../shared/skills/review --scope user

Podman setup gets out of your way

When DOCKER_HOST is not set, VibePod now asks Podman where its socket lives instead of failing with a confusing connection error. That matters most on macOS, where the machine socket path changes between machine starts, so a hardcoded DOCKER_HOST breaks after a reboot. Setting DOCKER_HOST explicitly still works and still takes precedence. The quickstart gained a macOS Podman machine setup walkthrough to match.

Cleaner images and working image pasting

Every pull that replaces a vibepod/ image now sweeps the dangling leftovers it created, so repeated latest pulls stop accumulating untagged layers. You can turn this off with auto_clean: false.

--paste-images works again: VibePod rewrites the host X authority cookie to the wildcard address family before mounting it, which is what the X server needs from a container that does not share your hostname. The flag is now documented, including its DISPLAY and xauth requirements.

Release details