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Enhanced Developer Experience with New Tools and Improved Workflows

April brought significant improvements to Zencoder’s functionality and user experience. We’ve focused on adding powerful new tools like the Bash/Shell tool and Requirements tool, enhancing UX, and making many under-the-hood improvements to make your development workflow more efficient.

Here’s what we’ve been working on:

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New Tools and Features

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Bash/Shell Tool for Coding Agent

The Bash tool is now available to the coding agent with significant improvements:

• Improved UX for safe commands that can run without confirmation
• Management options including “Don’t ask again” in both VS Code and JetBrains
• Works seamlessly with Coffee Mode for increased productivity and speed
• Enhanced MCP management of environment variables and npx, making it more stable

Learn More About Coding Agent

Explore how the Coding Agent can now leverage shell commands to better assist your development workflow.

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Requirements Tool

Our new Requirements tool helps the coding agent better understand your needs:

• Automatically asks for clarifications when needed
• Gives you greater control over your project and work
• Better understands prompts and delivers higher-quality results
• Reduces back-and-forth by getting requirements right the first time

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Enhanced Chat Experience

We’ve made several improvements to the chat interface:

• Added support and hints for using slash commands (/) and file mentions (@) in the chatbox
• New warning system when chats become too long, helping you optimize token usage across multiple chats
• Ability to attach files from outside of the project to provide better context

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Debugging and Support Improvements

We’ve made it easier to get help when you need it:

• Simplified access to Operation IDs and debug settings to help us troubleshoot issues more effectively

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Search and Review Enhancements

• Significant improvements to local (client-side) search functionality
• Enhanced /review command is now invoking a pre-built custom agent with the same name, providing more precise and valuable insights
• You can adjust this custom agent’s details in the Custom Agent settings

Learn More About Custom Agents

Discover how to customize the review agent and other specialized agents for your workflow.

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Documentation Updates

• New descriptions and updated GIFs for documentation on both JetBrains and VS Code marketplaces
• Added detailed guides on how to collect debug information and Operation IDs to help with troubleshooting
• Enhanced documentation to make it easier to get support when needed

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Bugs and Fixes

We’ve addressed several user-facing issues:

• Fixed an annoying bug where indexing sometimes gets stuck at “Updating index” after reopening the IDE
• Fixed a problem with cursor positioning above inserted code snippets
• Improvements to Jira authentication flow
• Fixed hanging errors between the bash/shell tool and our internal processing

Note: We’ve also made many background improvements and fixes that aren’t listed here but contribute to a more stable and reliable experience.

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Version History