Audio overview

Welcome to a quick audio overview of what's changed on aidaide.app. If you haven't been around since the summer, the site is doing a lot more than hosting release notes.

That's a good place to start. AidaIDE is still a free-forever SSH and SFTP workspace for Windows — an encrypted vault, tabbed terminals, dual-pane SFTP, the whole thing, no license key. Pro is optional at nineteen dollars a month. What's new is that the website itself became a product.

Meaning you can actually do work in the browser now, not just read marketing pages.

Right. Signed in, you get a dashboard for projects and invites, a marketplace where people publish and rate listings, a library for what you've published or installed, public profiles at /u/your-handle, and a community feed. Phones get their own marketplace, workspace, community, and account hub.

Let's rewind to the desktop side first, because that's still what most people come for. What's the build people actually download today?

1.0.0-rc15. That's the current signed Windows installer the in-app updater serves. You need a free account to download it — not a paid plan, just an account. Feature-wise it still carries the 1.0 batch from release candidate eleven.

And the headline of that batch is Hardware Lab.

Yes. Hardware Lab is virtual hardware-in-the-loop testing. You run device code against a simulated board — virtual pins, I²C, UART — on a virtual clock, so a thirty-second hardware scenario can finish in under a millisecond, and it's deterministic. You build scenarios from button presses, sensor edges, UART traffic, then assert pin states, pulse counts, I²C writes, and log output.

And you can take that same scenario to a real board?

That's Run on Device. Over the open SSH session it can push a tiny helper for that run, drive GPIO outputs, stream every output edge back, and diff real against virtual — matched edges with timing skew in milliseconds, plus edges the device never produced, and extras the sim didn't expect. Record is the other direction: watch real pins while you press buttons on the bench, then turn that edge stream into a scenario you can replay without the hardware.

There's also AI writing the tests?

AI Scenario and AI Fix. Scenario asks a model for stimuli and expectations for the current file and runs them. Fix sends failing checks back, applies the returned code — syntax-checked, editor undo preserved — and re-verifies in the simulator. Both honor Remote Models, so the model can be running on your own device. Those two are Pro. The lab itself — the simulator, the board view, Run on Device, Record — stays free.

How many boards?

Thirty-three. Raspberry Pi, Jetson, Arduino, ESP32 and friends, a Simulation Board, Generic Linux GPIO. The selected board shows up as a real pinout card, pins colored by I²C, SPI, UART, PWM, analog, or plain GPIO. After a run the trace replays on the board with play, pause, a scrubber, and a live clock. Scenarios import and export as JSON, so a test pack travels with the project.

That's a lot of hardware story. What else landed across the 1.0 candidates that people on the site would notice?

Local and remote language models — install Ollama on a device from the SSH Models tab, pull models onto that host, run agents against a model you control. Agents can attach to a saved device or the live SSH session and index the remote tree over SFTP. The installer also dropped about 3.7 gigabytes of machine-learning frameworks that didn't need to ship.

There's a network story too.

Rogue Device Hunt. Give it an unknown device, or now an IP or MAC address, and it traces the path to the access port using ARP and MAC tables, across switches, scoped by VLAN. Quick Scan actually reports every reachable device, not only SSH hosts, and finishes in seconds. On the Cloud Portal side, the web terminal got command history, a PTY that resizes with the window, scroll lock, find in output with Ctrl+F, a jump-to-bottom chip that counts lines while you're scrolled up, and live font zoom from six to forty point.

Okay. Let's talk about the website, because that's the other half of what changed on aidaide.app.

The marketplace is real now. Listings can be published as persona JSON or an .aidachip package. You can fork a listing onto a private shelf, rate it, comment, install it into your library. Cards show an average and a count when there are ratings, and they say no ratings yet when there aren't — no invented stars. You can browse by category and by tags that already exist on the loaded catalog. There's a bench-certified rail for listings that carry that tag, framed as founder bench runs, not a safety mark.

And if you filter yourself into an empty grid?

It stays honest. Reset filters, show all — it doesn't pivot into “be the first publisher” copy just because your tag search missed. True catalog-empty can still show the quieter publisher note. Share URLs for a listing, /marketplace/{id}, get a real open-graph title and description from the listing name, injected server-side, so a Slack or X card isn't a generic marketplace image.

Who can publish?

Any signed-in account can publish a persona, privately or publicly, including a Free account. IC, SoC, agent, and team chips still need Pro or Teams Pro. Publish is bound to the authenticated user. The author handle on a listing is the handle they claimed — never invented from email. And after you publish, My Library shows a Published by you shelf, even on Free.

Profiles and community?

Claimed handles resolve at /u/your-handle. Three to thirty characters, lowercase, unique. Follow, unfollow, and a community live-activity feed that defaults to Highlights — publishes, follows, comments, saves. Joins stay in All activity. There's a Discord CTA if you'd rather chat, and /discord just redirects to the invite. The dashboard also persists projects: create, invite, accept, decline.

I'm noticing a theme. A lot of this work is about not overselling.

That's deliberate. Host OS honesty: the shipping download is Windows today. macOS, Linux, and ARM stay marked in progress — no fake checkmarks. Every marketing download CTA goes through signup. Bare /download redirects to signup, not a naked installer. Google Ads conversion tags came off the site. Privacy now says GA4 can stay on pages that already had it; Ads tags are not used on aidaide.app.

Docs got a real pass too.

There's a citation-ready Hardware Lab definition at /guides/hardware-lab, and the in-app chapter is public at /docs/hardware-lab. The full user guide reads in one place at /docs/guide. New spokes: replace PuTTY and WinSCP, what is LCOT, SSH client with SFTP, SecureCRT alternative. The comparison hub at /vs/all covers PuTTY, WinSCP, Termius, MobaXterm, VS Code Remote SSH, Tabby, Warp, SecureCRT, FileZilla, Royal TSX. Tutorials include SSH into a Raspberry Pi from Windows, and Modbus and OPC UA over SSH without a VPN. Robotics covers ROS, Modbus, OPC UA, CAN bus, EtherCAT, PROFINET, MQTT.

And the site works on a phone?

Phone visitors get a dedicated layout — full-width actions, a readable terminal, bottom navigation. Add ?desktop=1 to keep the desktop page. Light and dark themes persist. Header logos stopped stretching to 512 pixels. There's a live status page, and Cloud Portal in the dashboard shows enrolled PCs with online or offline status.

If someone only remembers three things from this overview, what should they be?

One: the SSH and SFTP workspace is still free forever. Two: Hardware Lab lets you test device code without a device, and that's in the current Windows build. Three: aidaide.app is now a place you can publish, follow, and keep a library — not just a brochure. Create a free account to download, and the written changelog has every bullet we skipped.

That's the overview of what's changed on aidaide.app. The full notes are at aidaide.app/changelog.