0.3.1 taught Sprig to act. 0.4.0 is a big one: Chervil gets a real password manager, your published pages can come alive on the web, and a long list of everyday polish lands on top.
Passwords, built in — and Sprig never sees them
Chervil already filled your name, email, and address into forms. Now it does the sensitive half too, the right way.
- An encrypted vault. Set one master passphrase. Logins are encrypted with it (scrypt + AES‑256‑GCM, layered under your OS keychain) — the passphrase is never stored, and there's no backdoor.
- One‑click fill on real sites. On a login page, hit the 🔑 button and Chervil fills your username and password — scoped to that site's domain, and never auto‑submitted. You review and submit.
- It offers to save as you go. Sign in somewhere new and Chervil asks, "Save this login?" No copy‑pasting into settings.
- A strong‑password generator, and auto‑lock when you minimize Chervil or step away.
The boundary that matters: Sprig — the AI — never types or sees your passwords. Credentials never enter a prompt, never hit a log, never leave your machine. The agent's "always blocked: payments and logins" rule from 0.3.1 still holds. This is local, human‑in‑the‑loop, and yours.
Your published pages can come alive (Pro)
Until now, a page you published to a getchervil.com link was a snapshot. Two Pro upgrades change that:
- Live applets on the web. The hands‑on, generative widgets in your pages and lessons — the ones that call Sprig for fresh data — now work for your visitors, not just inside the app. Hit "Try it" on a hosted lesson and it actually runs.
- Cloud living pages. Tell a published page to stay current and Chervil re‑grounds it on a schedule in the cloud — even when your computer is asleep. Pick hourly, every six hours, or daily; everyone who opens the link sees the fresh version.
Both run on managed inference that's metered and hard‑capped per account, so "live" never means "runaway bill." It's the clearest line yet between free and Pro: the app and local creation stay free; hosting that does ongoing work is the paid part.
A cover for your pages
Turn it on (Settings → AI) and Sprig crowns content‑rich pages with a generated hero image — using your own OpenAI, Gemini, or Grok key. It's off by default (image generation costs money), shows a loading shimmer while it renders, and is smart enough to skip small tools like clocks and calculators, where a big photo would just look out of place.
Or just chat
Sometimes you don't want a whole composed page — you want a quick answer. Flip on chat mode (💬) for plain back‑and‑forth replies right in the conversation, then flip it off to return to composed pages and agentic actions.
The little things add up
A pile of everyday‑browser polish:
- "Go to YouTube" actually goes to YouTube — navigation intents open the real site instead of composing a page about it.
- Collapse the chat sidebar (Ctrl+\) for a full‑width page.
- Refresh any composed page in place from the remix bar.
- Bookmarks remember the whole session — reopening a bookmark restores the full conversation and pages, not just the query.
- Fresh starter ideas on the welcome screen every time.
- Quieter startup — launched at sign‑in, Chervil starts tucked in the tray instead of popping open.
- A cleaner update — the installer now offers to close a running Chervil for you.
- And published pages can be reported, so the public library stays clean.
Get it
Chervil is free, open source, and bring‑your‑own‑AI. Download for Windows, star it on GitHub, or come say hi on Discord. The hosting features live in Chervil Pro — $8/mo.