The chat moves to the middle of the editor and starts reading like a document. This release takes the panel out of the narrow column on the right, gives the transcript a real measure and type scale, and lets the agent answer you even when no folder is open.

It opens centred, as a tab, like a file — and that is the only place it lives. Drag it to a split, move it between groups, pull it into a second window: it behaves like every other editor because it now is one.

The old right-hand chat view is gone rather than deprioritised. One conversation with two possible hosts needed a hand-over card, a detached state, a move command and a replay on every transition — machinery for a choice nobody wanted. Sessions keeps the right-hand panel to itself, which is the right place for an index of past conversations: it no longer splits a narrow column with the conversation it indexes.

Closing the tab closes the chat, and closing is an ending rather than a discard — the session is sealed into History and memory learns from it, exactly as New Chat has always done. ⇧⌘I opens it again.

If you don’t want it opening on its own, set levelcode.ai.chat.startLocation: "none".

Nothing constrained line length before this. In a 380px sidebar the container did that job, so it never looked wrong — but a chat in an editor tab at 900px produced 154-character lines, and no amount of good prose survives that.

• A bounded measure. The column caps at 820px and centres, matched against the Claude Code console rather than derived from print typography — the 45–75 character rule assumes prose without identifiers, file paths or fenced code.
• Prose gets its own type. Message bodies now read one step above the workbench UI size, with looser leading. Expressed as an offset rather than a fixed number, so it tracks the editor font instead of inverting against it if you have raised that for accessibility.
• Hierarchy you can see. The heading scale moves from 1.3 / 1.18 / 1.07 — three levels inside a quarter of an em — to 1.45 / 1.25 / 1.1, with more space above a heading than below it.
• Rhythm that scales. Prose spacing is in em, anchored to the prose size, so raising the type opens the page instead of tightening it.
• Code blocks get room. pre padding widens and its margins join the same rhythm.

The whole panel shares one column: the composer, the status row and the notice bars line up with the prose above them instead of spanning the full width beneath it.

YOU and LEVELCODE AI sat above every message restating what the shape of the message already said. Your turn is now a tinted bubble on the right that hugs its content — "Yes" is a short bubble, a pasted stack trace is a wide one — and the assistant's is unadorned prose on the left.

The labels are gone from the screen but kept in the accessibility tree: the bubble is a purely visual cue, so removing the element outright would leave a screen reader with an unattributed wall of text.

Opening LevelCode without a workspace used to refuse every request outright — "Open a folder first." That guard was written for the file tools and placed where it failed the whole run, so a question that never needed a workspace died on it: what an error means, anything through an MCP server, a follow-up about the conversation itself.

The root now gates the tools that resolve a path against it, and nothing else. Rootless, list_files, read_file, search, edit_file, write_file, delete_file and run_command are withheld — a tool that is present but always fails is worse than one that is absent, because the model retries it — while update_plan, ask_user, use_skill and every MCP tool keep working. The model is told plainly why the file tools are missing, so it says so in a line instead of improvising about files it cannot see.

Both sizes are clamped at the boundary (8–24 and 320–2000). The minimum/maximum in a contribution schema only drive the settings editor; a hand-edited settings.json reaches the extension unchecked, and these land directly in CSS, where proseWidth: 1 is a one-pixel transcript with nothing left on screen to open settings with.

• Closing the chat no longer leaves the conversation loaded. Sealing the session ended it — so the next chat opened visually empty — while the in-memory history was still there and shipped to the model on the next message. The teardown now also stops in-flight work and reaps background commands and MCP servers, which are detached children and were outliving the surface that reported on them.
• A teardown cannot be raced by the run it is tearing down. Closing mid-stream aborts the request, and the abort landed in a handler that pushed the partial reply back into the history that had just been cleared — the exact leak the teardown exists to prevent, caused by the teardown's own abort.
• Reveals of the chat can no longer become unhandled promise rejections in the extension host. Failures are logged with the caller named rather than surfacing as an error attributed to nothing.

The Sessions panel still does not search. No filter, no fuzzy switcher, no keyboard jump — you scroll the list. It was the stated gap in v1.0.5 and it is still the gap; the chat surface took this cycle.

The empty-state wordmark had a false start. A redrawn mark shipped and had to be pulled: it was built from full block characters on the assumption they tile seamlessly in any monospace font, which is not true — whether █ fills its cell is a property of the font, and in Monaco it does not, so the logo shattered into disconnected bars. The replacement is drawn from box-drawing rules and real text, and was checked in seven font families before shipping this time.

• 34 suites, 575 cases across the bundled extensions — all green.
• test/chatSurface.test.js (23 cases) — the single-surface contract: one live webview, one message handler, the transcript surviving a hand-over, and a close that seals rather than discards.
• test/webviewCss.test.js (33 cases) — the layout invariants no DOM test can see: the measure, the shell column, the type scale, and the wordmark's width against its container.
• test/agentNoWorkspace.test.js (6 cases) — which tools are withheld without a root, which must keep working, and that the context meter is billed for the list that was actually sent.

Full changelog: https://github.com/levelcodeai/levelcode/compare/v1.0.5...v1.1.0