v1.8.0

Highlights

Verbose / Debug / native exe stderr are now visible to the AI. Pre-1.8 the tool description explicitly told you "Verbose and Debug streams are NOT visible to you" and native exe stderr (e.g. cmd /c '... 1>&2') was effectively swallowed. They now appear in the AI response in the same time-ordered position as everything else — closing the AI's biggest documented blind spot in the Output→Error→Warning→Verbose→Debug capture surface.

New Features

• Hybrid stream capture: chronological pipeline replaces bucketed sections. Output, Error, Warning, Verbose, and Debug records now interleave in a single time-ordered text block in the AI response — the AI sees each event in its actual position relative to surrounding output. Pre-1.8 the four separate === ERRORS === / === WARNINGS === etc. sections lost the "warning fired between step-A and step-B, then the error hit" context.
• Five output channels that used to bypass the AI's view are now captured:
  • Write-Verbose (was the AI's blind spot that the tool description explicitly called out as "Verbose and Debug streams are NOT visible to you").
  • Write-Debug (same).
  • [Console]::WriteLine / [Console]::Error.WriteLine direct writes (and any .NET interop that writes to System.Console without going through PowerShell streams) → new === CONSOLE.OUT (direct) === / === CONSOLE.ERR (direct) === sections.
  • Native exe stderr (cmd /c "..."-style) → ErrorRecord in the chronological pipeline, in emit order alongside surrounding output.
  • What if: text from $PSCmdlet.ShouldProcess and direct $Host.UI.WriteLine calls → new === HOST.UI (direct) === section.
• Auto-route on busy console. When invoke_expression finds the chosen PowerShell console busy with a user-typed or another AI command, the proxy now spawns a new console at the source's cwd and re-runs the pipeline there in the same tool call. Pre-1.8 the AI got Pipeline NOT executed - verify location and re-execute and had to re-send manually with whatever cwd they wanted, costing two MCP round-trips for every busy race.
• LastExit: N status-line tag surfaces the case where a pipeline overall succeeded ($? is true) but a native exe within it returned non-zero. The green ✓ badge no longer silently hides those signals.

Bug Fixes

• get_current_location now sets the window title when it claims an unowned console. Pre-fix, an AI whose first tool call was get_current_location (instead of invoke_expression or start_console, both of which already handled this) left the user's pre-existing Import-Module PowerShell.MCP console with the placeholder title #PID ____ until some later tool call redrew it. Symptom appeared intermittently depending on which tool the AI happened to call first.

Improvements

• Real-time streaming preserved through the new capture wiring — items render to the visible console as they arrive, not collected and rendered after the pipeline finishes.
• Color preserved on the visible console for every stream type: red Write-Error, yellow WARNING:, yellow VERBOSE: / DEBUG: prefixes, and Write-Host's user-chosen ForegroundColor.
• Write-Progress keeps rendering on the visible console for AI-initiated commands (Compress-Archive, Invoke-WebRequest, etc.) so the user can watch progress. Each redraw of pwsh 7's "Minimal" Progress view also writes the bar text to Console.Out; the polling engine recognizes those overlay blocks by their reverse-video bracketed-status framing — an ANSI SGR escape, then [, then a reverse-video toggle (ESC[7m … ESC[27m), then ] and reset (ESC[0m) — and strips them from the captured === CONSOLE.OUT (direct) === buffer before surfacing to the AI, so the response stays clean.

Internal

• New TeeTextWriter for [Console]::Out / [Console]::Error tee, written to in parallel with the original streams so visible-console output is unaffected.
• New TeePSHostUserInterface decorator wrapping $Host.UI (reflected swap on _externalUI) for host-UI-level capture of Write/WriteLine paths that bypass both PowerShell streams and [Console]::Out.
• Stream merge map widened to 2>&1 3>&1 4>&1 5>&1. Stream 6 (Information) remains unmerged so Write-Host's user-chosen ForegroundColor survives to the visible console.
• Single shared BuildInitCommand now drives the PowerShell init script for every non-Windows launcher (macOS tempFile, Linux Base64-encoded terminal launch, Linux headless ArgumentList path). Each platform keeps its own delivery mechanism for documented reasons — AppleScript echo on macOS, multi-shell quoting on Linux — but the script body and its single-quote escaping are now built in one place. xUnit pins the escaping for every platform that calls the helper.

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