Anvil has always been the AI that runs where you work and answers to you — your models, your keys, your data, your machine. With v2.2.29, that ownership grows a control plane. AnvilHub becomes mission control for every Anvil you run. Claim a deployment and manage it from the web: give it a name and a persona, choose its primary agent, and install or remove skills, plugins, and agents straight from the marketplace. Build something good locally, sync it up as a private draft, review it, and publish it to the community in a click. And when you sit down to compose a chain, you start from a working one instead of a blank canvas.
Under all of that, this release refreshes Anvil to the current generation of models across every provider, and makes the very first thing you do — set it up — quicker and cleaner.
Mission control for your deployments
Run Anvil as a claimed, hosted deployment and it now shows up on your AnvilHub account as something you can actually operate — not just a session that happens to be connected.
- Name it and give it a persona. Call your Anvil what you want and set its identity; the name and primary agent sync down to the host and survive restarts.
- Pick its primary agent. Choose which agent leads from the ones your deployment actually offers — your locally-built agents stay private to you, never exposed to the marketplace.
- See it live. A heartbeat orb tells you at a glance whether a deployment is online, and you can open its viewer in a new tab.
Install and remove capabilities from the marketplace
The AnvilHub marketplace is no longer just a place to browse — it’s how you shape what your Anvil can do.
- Add or remove skills, plugins, and agents on a claimed deployment straight from the web. Anvil downloads, verifies, and extracts each capability into place.
- Live when it’s online, queued when it’s asleep. If your Anvil is connected, changes apply immediately with live progress; if it’s offline, the desired change is queued and reconciled the moment it next checks in.
- One clear control per client. Revoke a deployment when you’re done with it, then delete it from your profile — it stays on the admin side for audit, but it’s off your view.
Build, sync, and publish your own
The most important addition is the loop that turns a private tool into a shared one — on your terms.
- Build locally. Author a skill, plugin, or agent on your own machine, the way you always have.
- Sync it up as a private draft. Your Anvil packs the capability and uploads it to your AnvilHub account under your identity. It lands as a private draft — visible only to you, never in the public marketplace.
- Review, then publish. Look it over in your account, and when you’re ready, publish it to the marketplace in a single click. Nothing leaves your machine until you say so, and nothing goes public until you promote it.
Start from a working chain
The chain builder now ships curated starter templates — pre-wired graphs of real skills already in the store — so composing a chain begins from something that works instead of an empty canvas.
- Secure API Foundation — JWT practices, RBAC, API keys, audit logging, and auth testing, already linked in order.
- AWS Serverless API — CDK infrastructure into API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB.
- Modern Data Pipeline — data contracts governing dbt transforms, Airflow orchestration, catalog, and lineage.
- AI RAG Application — prompt engineering into RAG systems into a tRPC API, verified with Playwright end-to-end tests.
Open one, see the skills wired together with their input and output handles, tweak it, and save it as your own chain.
The latest models, out of the box
Anvil’s model picker already fetches each provider’s live model list, so you always see the newest models the moment they ship. v2.2.29 refreshes the defaults and the bare aliases to the current flagships:
- Anthropic — Claude Opus 5 is the new default; Claude Fable 5 and Claude Sonnet 5 are a keystroke away.
- OpenAI — GPT-5.6 (Sol / Terra / Luna).
- xAI — Grok 4.5.
- Google — Gemini 3.6 Flash.
Switch mid-session with /model; the shorthand opus, sonnet, and grok now resolve to the current generation.
Fewer moving parts, more in the binary
For a long time, some of Anvil’s richest features leaned on external command-line tools — you needed SoX on your machine to capture audio, ffmpeg to read video, and a separate helper for local memory indexing. Every one of those was another thing to install, another thing to break, another thing between you and a working setup. In v2.2.29, those capabilities move inside Anvil as native, pure-Rust subsystems.
- Voice capture is native. Recording your microphone no longer shells out to SoX — Anvil captures audio in-process and emits the exact 16 kHz mono format transcription expects, closing a resampling gap the old shell path never enforced.
- Video reading is native. Reading a video for its frames and audio no longer requires ffmpeg on your system — Anvil decodes H.264 keyframes and extracts the audio track itself, so video analysis works out of the box.
- Memory and media are first-party. The indexing, media, and voice paths are Anvil’s own crates now, not external binaries it hopes you installed.
The payoff is a first run that just works. The setup wizard no longer installs external dependencies to get you going — no reaching out to install Ollama, transcription engines, or media tooling. Optional tools you already have are detected quietly and recorded, with no prompts or nags. Connecting to an Ollama server you already run is unchanged. And if you’d rather set things up in the browser, run anvil setup --web for the full guided wizard.
Because these subsystems ship in the binary, the same feature set is present whether you’re on the commercial build or the FIPS build — there’s no “install this first” asterisk.
Still great from the last release
If you’re arriving at Anvil now, a couple of things landed in v2.2.28 that are worth knowing about. The web viewer got a full visual pass — the force-directed mind map sits on a lit stage where nodes glow in their own color and a sparse ambient starfield drifts behind the graph, the conversation renders as real message cards with proper code panels and markdown, and the seven-layer memory is a clickable browser. And /atmosphere on|off carries that same starfield into the terminal, so the conversation, mind map, and memory share one calm, cohesive look. None of that changed in v2.2.29 — it’s just still there, and still good.
Own it, extended
Anvil is one local-first AI that speaks to every provider and does more than write code — it remembers across sessions, listens and speaks, runs agents, and automates real work. What v2.2.29 adds is reach without surrender: a marketplace and a management plane that make your Anvil more capable while keeping every layer yours to control.
Upgrade
Anvil v2.2.29 ships as native binaries for macOS (Apple silicon and Intel), Linux (x86-64 and ARM64), Windows, FreeBSD, and NetBSD.
- Homebrew:
brew install culpur/tap/anvil - macOS / Linux:
curl -fsSL https://anvilhub.culpur.net/install.sh | bash - Windows:
irm https://anvilhub.culpur.net/install.ps1 | iex
Already running Anvil? anvil upgrade pulls the new release in place. Browse the marketplace and manage your deployments at anvilhub.culpur.net.
