Week of August 17, 2026

Weekly Arka changelog: coding TUI upgrades, 3D scaffolds, media skills, MCP for Cursor and CodeRabbit, dev tools, and routing fixes.

New features

• Coding TUI plans and shortcuts. /plan now calls the LLM in plan-only mode with a local fallback, approving a plan with y runs it immediately, and /ci, /review, /status, and /diff are available as shortcuts.
• Strict /test and flexible /run tests. /test always runs repo-detected tests directly. /run tests uses a read-only goal agent, with --fix to allow one auto-fix pass and --no-fix to opt out.
• Compose 3D. Generate local 3D models from natural language with humanoid templates, smoother procedural shapes, and free backends (Hugging Face, Meshy, procedural fallback).
• Deterministic 3D scaffold. Greenfield 3D goals write a runnable React + Three.js project offline, and Arka auto-installs whitelisted npm dependencies for its own templates.
• Compose video and dub video. New edit_video and dub_video skills with a skill-requirements preflight so missing tools are flagged before a run.
• Infographics and stories. Ship infographic, compose_story, and play_website_game alongside expanded media routing.
• Meme templates and chart tables. Meme templates, table-as-PNG charts, flexible dataset chart routing, and better install hints when matplotlib is missing.
• Daily reading tracks. Topic-based curricula generated by the LLM, replacing the health-only reading flow.
• Generate music. New generate_music skill plus chart prediction backends.
• GitHub datasets and exercise dataset. Generic GitHub dataset importer and a dedicated exercise dataset skill.
• Graphify, hallmark, and loop engineering. New agents with CLI dispatch, guides, and default config bundled in.
• Recurring self-improve. Schedule self-improve runs to keep the codebase and docs on a cadence.
• Screenshot-to-design routing. Send a screenshot and Arka routes it into a design project.
• Lint any project. Language-agnostic lint project command detects the right linter per repo.
• Arka MCP in Cursor. Project and hub MCP configs with venv paths and ARKA_CONFIG_DIR let Cursor connect to arka mcp serve. arka mcp self-tools lists native MCP tools.
• CodeRabbit integration. Trigger @coderabbitai reviews from Arka, pull findings into pr_check workflows, and route PR feedback through NL commands.
• Railway deploy for coding. Hosted-mode Dockerfile and Railway config for the React-based remote coding demo.
• Free credits guide. Onboarding skill that walks newcomers through free provider credits.
• Project docs skill. Sync first-person README and blog content from recent git changes.

Improvements

• Coding TUI reliability. Short test/ci/lint goals go through deterministic executors instead of the LLM loop, /run no longer aborts on skipped cd or blocked git commands, and exit 0 is no longer shown for invalid or skipped commands.
• Changed-files display. Plans, /run completion, /diff, code_agent summaries, and goal completion now render boxed M/A/D file lists instead of raw diff output.
• Slides polish. compose_slides gains style-aware palettes, title/section/content layouts, a --theme flag, tighter prompts capped at four bullets per slide, and a notes toggle.
• Faster natural-language routing. New to_folder routing with folder_cache and answer_cache, symbolic URL repair with exact-URL routing, and output_verify plus edit_guard for safer file writes.
• LLM failover. Hardened OpenRouter fallback, Supermemory recall, and portable routing parity for timezone, currency, and persona skills across hosted and local setups.
• Docs restructure. Documentation is now organized into five top-level tabs with logical subgroups, previously orphaned pages wired into navigation, and Chinese and Hindi translations available.

Bug fixes

• Slides export. compose_slides now exports at standard 16:9 (13.333×7.5 in) so Keynote no longer rejects the PPTX, and images are re-encoded as clean RGB PNGs with tighter OOXML validation.
• Slides dispatch. Multi-word --topic values like "AI infrastructure" are tokenized correctly, and pitch-deck NL routing now includes the compose subcommand instead of falling through to argparse help.
• Quiz routing. arka quiz <topic> matches in fish before the LLM fallback, with a quiz alias and markdown/backtick dispatch blocked from shell exec.
• Docs command routing. help, full-URL open, mode debug/agent/list, and self memory/status now route correctly offline.
• Coding TUI scope. The TUI auto-initializes greenfield projects outside the Arka repo, validates scope before plan approval, and uses goal-aware local fallback plans for empty React repos.
• PyPI publish. The publish workflow retries trusted publishing first and falls back to PYPI_API_TOKEN when the PyPI publisher is not yet configured. Released as arka-agent 0.1.3.