PaddleBoard is in beta · PaddleBoard

What beta means here

It means the shape is settled. The features on this site are the features we intend to have; we’re not going to pull the rug on how personas work or where the sandbox lives. What’s left is the gap between “works on the machines we tested it on” and “works on yours.”

It does not mean feature-complete, and it does not mean bug-free. It means the bugs that remain are the ones we haven’t found yet rather than the ones we already know about and shipped anyway.

The stability bar

What we hold ourselves to:

Your files are not the experiment. Editing, saving, LSP, git, the terminal and the debugger are Zed’s, essentially unmodified, and they carry Zed’s reliability. Nothing PaddleBoard adds sits between you and your buffer.
Nothing leaves your machine unless you point it somewhere. Telemetry is disabled at the call site, not behind a setting. Local models run locally. The RAG index is a local SQLite database in PaddleBoard’s data directory. Usage tracking writes plain JSON to your disk. The only outbound traffic is to the model provider you configured, the update check, and things you explicitly ask for — a deploy, a git push.
Agents don’t execute code on your host by default. Tool calls that run code go into a sandbox. If the sandbox runtime is missing, the default is to block and offer to install it — not to quietly fall back to running on your machine.
Downgrades stay possible. Settings are additive; we don’t rewrite your config into a format an older build can’t read. If a release breaks something for you, the previous version is on the releases page and will still open your projects.

What we don’t promise yet:

That every code path has been exercised on hardware unlike ours.
That the newer surfaces — Set Sail, the RAG index, the built-in sandbox tier, Scion — are as battle-tested as the editor underneath them. They are the newest code and the most likely to surprise you.
That the UI is finished. Some of it is honestly rough, and the list below says where.

Known issues

Current as of 0.3.0. We’d rather you read this than discover it.

Coming in 0.3.1

We found a few things after 0.3.0 was cut. The fixes are already in, and they ship in 0.3.1.

macOS: on some macOS versions the window buttons sit on top of the back and forward arrows, and the line under the tab bar stops short beneath them.
Security: updated TLS and certificate handling (rustls 0.23.46, and a compromised root certificate removed from the fallback store).

Platforms

macOS builds are Apple Silicon only. No Intel build.
Linux ships as an x86_64 tarball — no .deb, no .rpm, no AppImage yet.
Windows is an unsigned preview. A zip for x86_64, built in CI from the same source as the macOS and Linux releases, but not code-signed. The first run shows a SmartScreen warning: More info, then Run anyway. There is no installer, no in-app update (download the next zip), and no managed Local Models — bring your own API key or point PaddleBoard at a local OpenAI-compatible endpoint. The window can’t yet be dragged by its title bar (#87).
In-app updates work on macOS and Linux.

Rough edges we know about

Several status-bar icons have no visible label, so what they do isn’t discoverable without hovering.
Every MCP server in the catalog shares one generic icon.
The default keymap selector shows “Zed” as an option name, which is accurate — it is Zed’s keymap — but reads oddly inside a different product.

Opt-in by design, so they look missing until you turn them on

Java, Kotlin, PHP, C#, C++ language servers are opt-in — run Manage Languages from the command palette. This is deliberate: each needs an external toolchain, and we’d rather show you the prerequisite than fail silently when it’s absent.
Scion parallel-agent support requires go install and an explicit "paddleboard_scion": { "enabled": true }. Installing the CLI alone doesn’t activate it.
Semantic search (RAG) is off until you set "paddleboard_rag": { "enabled": true }. It indexes into the local SQLite store by default; official builds also include the pgvector backend, used only when you set "store_backend": "pgvector".
Spotter is off until you set "paddleboard_spotter" with your tiers and a project check command. Escalating to a stronger tier asks first by default, because it is the moment work moves from a free local model to a paid one.

Caveats worth stating

Spotter is new in 0.3.0. The check runs in the agent’s sandbox, which has no network by default, so pick a check that works offline. Escalation is triggered only by a failed check, never by guessing how hard a task is.
Placid mode hides the docks and centers the editor, but not the tab bar, status bar or gutter. Those are global settings read in ~1,100 places, so scoping them per-window is a settings-system refactor, not a toggle.
TLS against a remote pgvector instance is untested. 🔍
Set Sail hands interactive auth to your terminal rather than running it. That’s intentional, but it means a deploy isn’t fully hands-off the first time.
Managed Local Models run with an 8K context window. Long agent threads fill it quickly, and automatic context compaction only runs on models with 80K or more, so on the local model you’ll be asked to start a new thread instead. Larger context is on the list for after the beta.

How to report something

GitHub Discussions is the front door — there’s a Beta Feedback category. Bugs with a reproduction are better as issues.

This matters more here than in most betas. With telemetry off, you telling us is the only signal that exists. We can’t see a crash you didn’t report, we can’t count how many people bounced off onboarding, and we don’t know which features go unused. That’s the trade we chose, and it only works if the reporting path is easy.

Useful things to include: your OS and chip, the PaddleBoard version, which model provider you’re on, and what you expected instead. Logs live in ~/Library/Logs/PaddleBoard/ on macOS, ~/.local/share/paddleboard/logs on Linux, and %LOCALAPPDATA%\PaddleBoard\logs on Windows.

What happens after beta

Weekly changelog threads in Discussions, weekly upstream Zed merges, and 1.0 when the known-issues list above is short enough to be boring. No date on that — a date would be a guess, and you’d hold us to it.