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Changelog

What's new in ZenSearch

Recent features, integrations, and improvements — grouped by month. Link out to the deeper write-ups where we have them.

April 2026

  • Feature

    Agent cost control: pre-flight ceilings and soft-limit pause

    Agent runs now go through a five-layer budget system: complexity-aware tiers, per-sub-task wall-clock timeouts, a pre-flight dollar ceiling that rejects expensive plans before any tokens are spent, mid-run cost enforcement, and a soft-limit pause that saves a resumable checkpoint with a 7-day TTL when any budget exhausts.

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  • Feature

    Procedural memory — self-improving agent workflows

    After successful multi-tool sessions (≥5 tool calls, ≥0.7 synthesis confidence), agents now distill the workflow into a reusable procedure and progressively disclose it to future runs via the new view_procedure tool.

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  • Feature

    Observational memory for long conversations

    LLM-based observer extracts key findings, tool usage, and pending work from long sessions into a compact summary. Typically 80%+ token compression on 50+ message conversations; injected as a cacheable system-prompt prefix.

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  • Improvement

    Recovery recipes for transient tool failures

    Timeouts, rate limits, and upstream 5xx errors are now auto-retried once before escalation. Retries don't count against tool-call budgets. Opt out via AGENT_RECOVERY_ENABLED=false.

  • Improvement

    Live cost meter in the chat UI

    cost_update SSE event streams every few iterations so users see real dollars ticking up against the per-run cap while the agent is still running. Cadence configurable via AGENT_COST_UPDATE_INTERVAL.

March 2026

  • Integration

    Google Workspace agent tools (18)

    Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Sheets — read and write. OAuth 2.0 or Google Service Account with domain-wide delegation. Agents now act as the end user, with per-user OAuth tokens.

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  • Integration

    Microsoft 365 agent tools (33+)

    OneDrive, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Planner, plus Graph-powered org-chart and calendar free-busy. OAuth through Azure AD with per-scope configuration.

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  • Integration

    Zendesk, Airtable, and Notion agent tools

    Zendesk (14 tools — ticket CRUD, help-center articles, users, organisations), Airtable (8 — bases, records, comments), Notion (12 — pages, databases, blocks, comments). All via per-user OAuth where supported.

  • Feature

    Custom webhook tools and MCP server support

    Admins can register internal HTTP endpoints as agent tools (name, URL, method, auth, parameter schema — encrypted credentials). For third-party tool servers, ZenSearch speaks Model Context Protocol (MCP) as a client — register an MCP server and its tools appear in the team's tool catalog.

  • Feature

    Slack and Microsoft Teams assistant surfaces

    Native assistants in both chat apps: Block Kit answers and approval cards in Slack, Adaptive Cards and threaded replies in Teams. Cross-surface continuity — the same conversation follows the user between web, Slack, and Teams.

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  • Integration

    Model Gateway providers: Groq, OpenRouter, Azure AI Foundry, Amazon Bedrock

    Every AI call routes through a central gateway. Swap providers with one env var — Groq for speed, OpenRouter for unified billing across 100+ upstream models, Azure for per-tenant OpenAI, Bedrock for AWS-native Claude and Nova. Ollama still works via OpenAI-compatible endpoint for fully local deployment.

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  • Improvement

    Prompt caching on chat calls

    Anthropic cache_control ephemeral markers get a 90% discount on cached reads; OpenAI and Groq prefix caching get ~50%. Tracked as cached_input_tokens and cache_creation_input_tokens on the usage ledger.

  • Improvement

    Multimodal chat: mixed text + image content

    ContentParts on chat messages lets agents pass image inputs (file uploads, extracted document images) to vision-capable models. Token estimation accounts for ~765 tokens per image part.

  • Feature

    Incremental sync intelligence

    Content-hash dedup short-circuits unchanged documents before they enter the parse pipeline. A PageChangeDetector handles web-crawl delta. A DeletionDetector uses set-diff against each connector's seen source IDs to find removals, with a 50% safety threshold that refuses to act on suspiciously large deletion sets.

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February 2026

  • Feature

    Chrome browser extension with side-panel chat

    AI assistant in a browser side panel, aware of the current page context. Keyboard shortcuts, session persistence, and identity federation with the web app.

  • Feature

    Canvas artifacts — versioned, persistent AI outputs

    Agents produce structured outputs (code, reports, plans) into a side panel with diff view, version history, and user editing. Content types: markdown, code (Python, Go, TypeScript, etc.), JSON.

  • Improvement

    Answer confidence scoring and citation grounding

    Composite confidence score (0.0–1.0) from coverage ratio, shape confidence, and violation-free signals; surfaced as High/Medium/Low confidence in the chat UI. Post-synthesis verification semantically checks citations against sources and corrects misattributions.

January 2026

  • Integration

    PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouse, SQL Server via NL-to-SQL

    Natural-language-to-SQL over all four databases. Schema discovery, read-only query execution, and automatic error correction via LLM-friendly error messages.

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  • Feature

    Document-level RBAC synced from source systems

    Permission metadata imported from Confluence, SharePoint, Google Drive, and identity providers on every sync. Applied as a query-time filter — restricted documents never enter the ranking pipeline.

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  • Feature

    Guardrails — input and output validation

    Prompt injection and PII detection on inputs; hallucination (lexical/semantic/hybrid), toxicity, and relevance checks on outputs. Configurable per team with hot-reload.

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