News

Blackbear Week 8 — CLI, Graph View, Store Files, Pax Upgrades, Discovery Catalog, Landing Page Redesign, Rust WASM, and Polish

To put it mildly, it's been an absolutely insane week here at Xavi Group, so it seemed only fitting that this should also be the week we make our first official update post.

Blackbear is rapidly approaching version 2.0, which is when we'll feel fully comfortable distributing Blackbear for general use and ending the beta period. For everyone who has tried Blackbear and who has helped to kick the tires, we cannot thank you enough for your feedback and support!

The second half of this post will get more technical, but for this first part we'll focus on how we've made Blackbear better for the human experience.

Blackbear for Humans / Week 8 Improvements

If you've signed in to Blackbear before, likely the first thing you'll notice is a comprehensive improvement to the Blackbear sign-in flow and onboarding steps. Google OAuth support is now available alongside magic link sign in, and if you've been using a Gmail account, either mechanism will work to get you signed in. We hope to be shipping support for Apple OAuth soon as well. Importantly, regardless of what mechanism you choose, information like your email is never stored unencrypted or logged without redaction. Blackbear continues to strive to retain as little identifiable information as possible.

We've also removed the 14 day trial timer. It was adding noise and friction and ultimately we want Blackbear's tools to be accessible to as many people as possible at no cost. Creating an account still is required for all features that have an ongoing operational cost attached, but we hope the anonymous mode is useful for all who need or desire it.

Moving past the sign in flow, Blackbear has improved its organization of initial materials dramatically. When you sign in to Blackbear or create a new account, you'll find a rich welcome note and a small documentation directory to help surface what features exist and how you can get started with organizing and setting up your space.

A new profile feature with cryptographic keys for signing the actions taken by you and by Pax has landed. This enables you (and Pax) to cryptographically verify who created what content / what notes / what events / etc., and pairs well with the new version control features. If that's too much jargon, the main takeaway is that your voice, your actions, and your ideas will remain distinct from agentic content in Blackbear by default, and with no configuration required on your part.

Another big UI/UX change you'll see this week is the new Graph tab in the Desk. The Graph is pretty awesome, as it builds off of cross link primitives that enable you to link markdown notes, events, tasks, and pretty much everything in Blackbear so that relationships and insights emerge naturally.

For Discovery, a new Catalog tab has been added where you can quickly browse and add content directly into Blackbear from open catalogs like ArXiv, Open Library, LibriVox, and more! Getting some free jazz music from the internet archive and using a Mix to play it in the background while a podcast rolls… pretty sweet.

On top of these big changes, there are a number of "smaller" wins this week. For one, the Pax bubble on Mobile has gotten a lot better at staying out of your way, and also now provides full-app search and capture modes. Merging search into Pax's action window is nice simplification, and the "capture" mode enables creating tasks, events, notes, and more by just describing what you want (no AI inference, just a good algorithm) with a preview-before-apply flow that ensures you get what you desire. This levels up the Pax chat in a big way, and we're excited to continue rolling more improvements into Pax's action panel.

Blackbear for Agents & Developers / Week 8 Improvements

This is the first week where the Blackbear CLI (brew install xavi-group/tap/bb) is available for power-user and agentic use, and we are super, super excited about it!

Agents using bb can bootstrap themselves in minutes, gaining a persistent, encrypted, distributed storage for their session transcripts, their planning files, their tasks, their events, and more. They are also able to interact with your data in Blackbear, allowing for natural collaboration on top of the version history system. Additionally, your actions, and those of your AI agents, (as mentioned earlier) are all cryptographically signed, allowing you (and them) to discern at a glance what is human authored or AI authored. This keeps your voice and your work distinct, so it never gets lost in agentic outputs.

Internally at Xavi Group we have already started to use the bb cli to manage the sync and distribution of things like planning files and other artifacts. It's been fantastic.

The aforementioned Graph view and cross linking primitives in Blackbear can be used to build up incredibly rich data spanning not just your agents plan files and sessions, but also events, routines, tasks, and pretty much every other surface within Blackbear. Over time as this system improves, we hope it provides an organic way to surface insights and assist with organization across domains.

Pax will increasingly be using the cross-linking primitives and features within blackbear (markdown notes as skill files for example) to manage their own organization. This will extend naturally with the collaboration model in Blackbear, which enables distribution of skills to your friends and colleagues pretty seamlessly.

We are also implementing more features for agents (like store files) that will allow agents to use blackbear as an agent-native, single source of truth for secrets management. These primitives are still rough right now, but we're excited to see what future integrations enable.

Blackbear Technical Notes / Week 8 Upgrades

On top of these exciting feature developments, we've been going through and polishing the internals of blackbear-app, blackbear-api, and blackbear-cli.

With the new addition of blackbear-cli, some common elements like cryptography and merge logic have been migrated to Rust, and are provided in the blackbear-app as WASM packages. In general, we've seen this increase speeds for encryption and decryption (blackbear uses industry standard and hardened encryption libraries like ChaCha20-Poly1305, Argon2, X25519, and HKDF-SHA256 via the RustCrypto ecosystem), but the main thing is that it keeps the Rust CLI and web-app using the same underlying logic for these critical infrastructure components, which we test the hell out of.

Bug fixes and improvements have been made across a few critical areas:

• Multi-device file/task/event/etc. modifications should now resolve cleanly even when devices are offline with pending edits for long periods of time.
• Account device management has gotten similarly improved by unifying to a single device model with permissions awareness and cleaner platform logic splitting. This should reduce the appearance of ghost devices and enable more visibility into what devices are attached to your account.
• Messaging identities and conversations have been hammered on to ensure that conversations, contacts, profile exchanges, and social features are synced across devices and between accounts deterministically.

If you've been using Blackbear during the beta period and have noticed any issues with these things, please let us know via the feedback form in account settings!

Beyond these larger infrastructure / platform efforts, progress has been made towards a reusable component playground that triples as a mechanism for automated UI regression testing, active development screenshot validation, and marketing materials curation. The first pieces of this system have been used to revamp the blackbear landing page with screenshots of the real components in Blackbear, and automated pipelines are being established to keep these images up-to-date as Blackbear continues to increase the velocity of its feature outputs.

In general, this week has seen tremendous technical growth and maturity entering into the platform, and Blackbear has never been more stable and secure. We're excited to continue these efforts and extend into a few new ones next week!