Beta 3: updates that install themselves, restarts that leave your jobs alone, and seven new languages

Saturday, October 24, 2026 · Alex Rabin

kinhin watches your CI queue and, for each queued job, starts a fresh VM or container on your Apple Silicon Mac, registers a one-job runner, lets it run, then deletes it. Nothing idles and nothing is left over. It is free, open source (Apache-2.0), and sends no telemetry.

Beta 3 keeps a promise from the beta 2 post, makes the app update itself, and adds a few things for people who make videos or run their own models. This post covers what is new, what has been run, and what has not.

Keeping a promise: restarts

The beta 2 post carried a correction: on beta 2, restarting kinhin re-attached running VMs and then registered their runners again, which could disrupt a job already running on one. Beta 3 fixes that.

• A restart no longer registers a VM again while its runner is still on the forge. A runner the forge still has is watched. A VM with no runner is registered as normal.
• A VM whose forge cannot be asked is held, shown by an adoption alert, until it can be. A VM whose account has no forge attached is held the same way and removed after one hour. A VM whose account was removed from the config is released at once.
• A classic container runner is registered again after a host reboot or container system stop, when the forge no longer has it.
• Registration stops a leftover agent without pkill, and fails if it survives.

Restarts explains each rule. I tested this live on 2026-10-24: I upgraded a Mac with real state from beta 2, and restarted kinhin while a job was running. The job was left alone.

What is new

An updater that installs itself

The app now updates through Sparkle. It downloads the new release, checks its EdDSA signature, replaces the running app and relaunches. It checks once a day, and Settings → App shows Install Update… when one is waiting. After an upgrade, the app restarts a daemon still running the previous build, which interrupts that daemon's jobs, so update when the fleet is idle.

Beta 2 and earlier open the DMG for a manual drag into Applications, and beta 2 published no update feed, so you update by hand once, from beta 2 to beta 3. Updates after that install automatically. The in-app install has not been exercised against a published release yet. That needs a release that already contains the updater, so the first real test is beta 3 to the next release.

Healing with your own models

The healing agent can ask Ollama instead of Apple Intelligence: healing: {ai: ollama, ollama: {model: …}}. An optional fast_model is asked first, and the larger model answers when it is not confident. Traffic goes to this Mac by default. Any other host must be https, and it then receives the redacted problem, the allowed fixes and the log lines. It still only chooses among fixes that are already allowed. See docs/healing.md.

Videos with a camera

Videos from your repository got a director:

• A device or terminal scene's camera zooms and pans, focus spotlights part of the screen and cursor adds a pointer with click rings. Adapters can name regions of a clip, so a redesigned screen is fixed once.
• karaoke captions light each word as it is spoken. transition replaces the fade between scenes. speed takes eased segments, and a split scene plays two recordings side by side.
• Rebuilds reuse the voice and the framed clips, so a one-line edit no longer redoes the video. kinhin video build --scene app,outro builds a quick preview, --watch rebuilds on change, and every build prints how long each step took.

Nothing changes for a video that does not use them.

Seven new languages for the app

The menu bar app now follows the macOS language in Spanish, Japanese, German, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian and French. These are first drafts, not reviewed by native speakers. The CLI, its output and the docs stay English. Disclosure arrows mirror in right-to-left languages. I have not looked at every language in the running app, so expect truncated text or odd layout somewhere.

Fixes

• kinhin image digest and the app's Pin button no longer fail with registry answered HTTP 404 for Cirrus Labs images.
• A new VM no longer waits the whole vm_boot_timeout when macOS Local Network privacy blocks its port 22 probe. After 15 seconds kinhin tries SSH anyway and logs why. The app declares a Local Network usage description.
• kinhin doctor no longer calls Command Line Tools outdated when they only trail macOS by a patch release.
• kinhin auth list --json exists, and kinhin auth status --account NAME --json reports only that account.
• Azure DevOps warns at start-up when the agent pool has no matching agent.

Where the forges stand

Beta 3 was going to be the "more forges" release. It is not. Buildkite, Azure Pipelines and Bitbucket Pipelines need real accounts and a dedicated test Mac that I have not set up, and I would rather ship what is done than claim support I have not run. Azure Pipelines is now labelled experimental: one user ran smoke jobs against Azure DevOps Services, two concurrent VMs and scale from zero, but not a real application build. Buildkite and Bitbucket Pipelines are still planned. Test fixtures for all three are written and have not run. This work moves to beta 4. GitHub, Gitea, Forgejo and GitLab CE remain the supported forges.

What has been run

Run means it was executed for this release. Not yet means it has not been, and I am not claiming it.

• Run: the unit suite (3,453 tests, no VMs or network) and the release build's own check, on the release commit.
• Run: the ThreadSanitizer run on the release commit, with no reports.
• Run: an upgrade from beta 2 on a Mac with real state (nothing lost), and a restart under a real running job, which was left alone. One Mac, one pass.
• Not yet: the end-to-end suite on this release. It runs only in CI, and its dedicated Mac is not registered yet.
• Not yet: the Buildkite, Azure Pipelines and Bitbucket Pipelines lanes.
• Not yet: a long-running soak test.

Try it

The release is published on GitHub. Install it with:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/RabinApps/kinhin/releases/latest/download/install.sh | bash

You need an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 15 or newer with about 60 GB of free disk, and an access token for your forge. The Quick start goes from install to a running fleet. Coming from beta 2, install over it by hand once, when no jobs are running.

Where I need help

1. Restarting under load. Restart the daemon (or reboot the Mac) while jobs run, and tell me whether any job was disturbed.
2. Upgrading with real state. Your fleet, project images and config, on beta 2, then beta 3. Tell me if anything was lost.
3. The updater. The first in-app update is from this release to the next. Tell me whether it installed and relaunched.
4. A language that is not English. Tell me which strings are wrong, awkward or cut off.
5. Ollama healing and video cameras. Send me a journal entry or a video that looks wrong.
6. Real projects on the supported forges, and real Azure DevOps builds.

One real report is valuable, including when it fails. Open a forge or runtime report and attach the output of kinhin doctor --bundle after a glance through it, since it is redacted but not perfect.

Thank you

kinhin is free and Apache-2.0. If it saves you CI minutes, you can support it.

Alex