What’s new in Playcode

Settings is now one word. Everything that used to hide in the Preferences and Appearance menus - theme, language, editor options, AI defaults - lives in a single Settings modal you can open from anywhere.

The modal is grouped by scope, so it is always clear who a setting affects:

• Project - name, archive, publish address and custom domains, plus how the project runs: watermark, live reload, SPA mode, live view delay, loop protection, and production build options. This group appears when you open Settings from inside a project.
• You - profile, appearance, editor preferences, and your AI defaults (model tier, effort, context, voice input). These follow you across all workspaces.
• Workspace - general settings, people and teams, billing and plans, usage, and the affiliate program.

Two behaviors worth knowing:

• A chat keeps whatever quality settings you give it; a new chat starts from your defaults in Settings.
• To make the current chat's setup your default, use Set as my default right in the build-quality dialog - one tap, no extra dialog.

The project menu now holds only actions. Every knob has a home in Settings.

Playcode now asks for confirmation before you increase context above Medium, switch to Ultra, or move from a stronger model to Economy.

Each dialog explains the practical trade-off without discouraging the choice. Economy highlights lower credit use and explains what to do if a complex task starts repeating; larger context and Ultra explain their higher credit use. Re-selecting the current mode, lowering context, or leaving Ultra remains immediate.

Pro mode now starts with GPT-5.6 Sol, OpenAI's flagship model for complex builds, detailed design work, and difficult debugging.

Your existing model choice is preserved if you selected one yourself. You can switch the Pro model at any time from the build-quality picker or Preferences > AI Model > Quality Model.

Cloud projects now have a File Explorer. Open the Files tab in the editor's left panel to browse everything the AI built for you - and edit any file yourself.

• Browse your whole project. Folders load as you expand them, so even huge projects open instantly.
• Edit with a real code editor. Click a file to open it in a tab with syntax highlighting. Changes save automatically to your app.
• Stays in sync with the AI. When the AI finishes making changes, the file tree and your open files refresh on their own.
• Full file management. Create, rename, delete, and download files and folders right from the tree - folders arrive as a single archive.
• Upload from your computer. Drop files or whole folders onto the tree (structure preserved), or use the upload button.
• Markdown preview. Open any .md file and flip between source and a rendered preview.
• Drag to move. Reorganize your project by dragging files and folders in the tree.

Your files live on your app's own server, so what you see in the explorer is exactly what your app runs. Big or binary files (images, archives) show a summary card with a download button instead of opening as text.

Building a site is half the job - people need to find it. Your Playcode AI can now research real search data while it works on your project:

• Keyword research. Ask "what keywords should my site target?" and get real Google search volumes, difficulty scores, and search intent - not guesses. It can also pull the full keyword list any competitor ranks for.
• Backlink intelligence. See who links to any site: total authority, top referring domains, and the exact linking pages. Great for finding sites that link to your competitors but not to you yet.
• Live Google results. Check who actually ranks for a search today - and whether your site shows up.

Just ask in chat: "find low-competition keywords for my bakery site", "who links to my competitor?", or "where do I rank for handmade candles?". The AI pulls the data, reads it, and turns it into a concrete plan - new pages, better titles, link targets.

Available on paid plans. Each lookup uses a small amount of credits (about the same as generating an image), and repeated identical lookups within a day are free.

Your Playcode AI can now hand heavy work to background agents - and stay available while they run.

• It keeps talking while they work. Ask for research, an audit, or a build slice "in the background" and the AI starts a task, tells you the id, and keeps the conversation going. When the task finishes, the result lands right back in your chat.
• A tasks panel in the editor. See every background task with a live status - queued, running, finished - how long it's been going, and a stop button while it's alive.
• Every task is a real chat. Open any task to watch the agent work message by message, exactly like your main chat. Type into it to steer a running agent mid-flight, or message a finished one to continue where it left off.
• Built-in quality loop. For bigger builds the AI can run build -> audit -> fix cycles: a coder agent implements, an auditor agent reviews against your requirements and returns a concrete verdict, and fixes get their own task - before the result comes back to you.

Long tasks no longer look like a hang: if an agent hits a limit, you get the partial result and can send it a follow-up to continue. Tasks even survive our own deploys - they resume from their chat history instead of failing.

Background agents got a big round of polish the same day they shipped:

• Agents now build in parallel. The AI can run several build agents at once - each with its own slice of the work - instead of queueing them one after another. Big builds finish sooner.
• You can see what each task runs on. Every task now shows its agent type and model tier right in the tasks panel, and read-only helpers (research, code exploration) always use the economy model. A task never uses a more expensive tier than your chat is set to - upgrading is always your call, never the AI's.
• Research you can trust. A research agent must fetch real web sources now; if it ever answers without them, the result is clearly flagged so you know it came from memory, not the web.
• Smoother task navigation. The tasks panel has a proper header and close button, and the back button in a task returns you to wherever you came from - the chat or the list. Failed and stopped tasks say what actually happened instead of a generic line.
• Calmer credit warnings. Running low shows a quiet amber note above the chat box (dismissible), with a heads-up at 50% and 15% remaining - including on the Free plan, which previously got no warning at all. Out of credits is now a one-click "Top up" (or "Upgrade" on Free), never a red alarm.
• Clearer controls. Stopping a task is a stop square now (the old ✕ looked like "close"), task cards keep their title readable on narrow screens, your chat list shows a small spinner on any chat the AI is still working in, and undo works on file changes inside a task's transcript too.

The chat composer got a full redesign:

• One quiet frame. Softer corners, a lower profile, and every control in calm ink - the send button is the only thing that lights up.
• Notices slide out from behind. Credit warnings no longer stack a banner on top of the chat box; they dock behind it as a slim strip, so the composer always stays in front.
• Compact attachments. Files and images you attach are now small chips inside the frame instead of large preview cards.
• Little touches. A frosted-glass scroll-to-bottom button, a clearer sidebar icon, and a bit more breathing room in the header - especially on phones.

Every chat now carries its own receipt. Open the chat picker in the editor (click the chat name above the conversation) and the bottom of the menu shows two quiet numbers for the current chat:

• Spent in this chat - the total AI credits this conversation has used so far.
• Context - how much of the model's working memory the chat is filling.

When a chat runs long, the context number turns amber with a tip: long chats reply slower and cost more, so starting a new chat for the next task keeps you fast and cheap.

Nothing ticks while the AI works - the receipt only appears when you ask for it.

You can now pick exactly how Playcode builds - and swap the model behind each tier - right from the Choose build quality menu next to the composer.

Three tiers, your call.

• Economy - fast and low-cost, great for simple edits, fixes, and basic pages.
• Pro - the default: detailed design, the cleanest results, and the fewest errors.
• Ultra - new. Our most capable model, for the hardest, highest-stakes builds.

Pick the model per tier. Each tier has a small model chip - tap it to choose from a curated shortlist, with a cost signal so the trade-off is clear. Set your preferred Pro model once and it sticks.

Tune the context, too. A new Context dial controls how much of the conversation the agent keeps before it summarizes - turn it up for long files and deep sessions, or down to keep runs lean.

Builds on GPT-5.6 Sol (available in the Pro tier) now reuse cached context between steps, so multi-step agent runs are noticeably faster and spend fewer credits.

Why it matters. A long agent turn re-sends a lot of the same context on every step. Sol now caches that context, so the repeated parts are much cheaper - more of your credits go toward new work instead of re-processing what the agent already read.

Your teammates' names and emails now appear instantly in the People view and the share dialog - and keep working even when your connection drops.

No more waiting or blanks. Names and avatars for everyone you share a workspace or project with are kept in sync locally, so the roster renders immediately instead of blanking while it fetches. Open the People page or a share dialog offline and you still see who's who.

Workspaces now have teams - named groups of people you can share with in one step.

Create a team from Settings -> People -> Teams and add workspace members to it. Then, in the Share popup, grant access to the team the same way you would to a person: everyone in the team gets that access at once.

Teams stay live as your group changes. Add someone to a team and they immediately get everything the team has been given; remove them and that access goes away just as fast. No more re-sharing a dozen projects when a new person joins.

The Share popup shows exactly where access comes from: grants received through a team are labeled "via team", and the team's access level is edited in one place - on the team grant itself. A direct personal share and a team share can coexist; the more permissive one wins.

A workspace is no longer tied to the one person who clicked "Create".

Any number of admins. Promote as many teammates to admin as you need - every admin can manage members, sharing, settings, and billing with equal rights. There is no single "super owner" anymore; the person who created the workspace is simply its first admin.

Ownership is transferable. Handing a workspace over is now just a role change: make the new person an admin, and they can take it from there - including if the original creator later leaves the company. Playcode always keeps at least one admin in place, so a workspace can never lock itself out.

Nothing changes for your personal workspace - it stays yours.

Give a teammate Admin on a single project and they can now run it end to end.

Publish, snapshot, restore. A project admin can publish and unpublish the project, create and restore checkpoints, retry provisioning, and manage its published subdomain - without needing to be a workspace admin.

Destructive actions stay protected. Deleting or moving a project, and attaching custom domains, still require the project's creator or a workspace admin. So you can hand someone the keys to operate a project without risking that it gets erased or relocated.

Workspaces now have their own billing. A team workspace can subscribe to Pro or Business, buy credits, and manage its payment method - independently of anyone's personal plan.

Every workspace has its own credit balance. Work done in a team project uses the team's credits, not yours - and a teammate on a free personal plan gets the full power of the workspace's plan while building there, including the best AI models. Your personal workspace keeps its own plan and credits, exactly as before.

Everyone sees the team's credit meter. Members can always check how many credits the workspace has left and when they refresh. Payment details stay private: only the workspace owner and admins can see the card, change the plan, buy credits, or configure auto-recharge - members who run low see who to ask instead of a dead end.

Upgrading is contextual. Open pricing from inside a team workspace and the subscription goes to the team; open it from your personal workspace and it's yours. Each workspace gets its own invoices and billing portal.

Existing subscriptions carried over automatically - if you were subscribed, your personal workspace has the same plan, credits, card, and invoice history as before, with no action needed.

Playcode now has workspaces - shared spaces where your whole team builds together.

Create or switch workspaces from the main dashboard menu and invite teammates by email - they don't need a Playcode account yet; the invitation walks them through signing up. On phones, projects, folders, and the workspace menu share one sidebar, so navigation never stacks drawers. Everyone in the workspace sees its projects live: when a teammate creates or edits a project, it appears for you in real time.

Sharing got personal, too. The Share popup in the editor now works the way you'd expect from tools like Notion: type an email, pick a role (Viewer or Editor), and that one person gets access to that one project - whether or not they're in your workspace. Projects shared with you show up in a new "Shared with me" section in the sidebar.

Viewer access is consistently read-only across code, chat, publishing, and Cloud controls. Editors can change project content without receiving owner-only sharing or lifecycle controls, and any direct collaborator can leave a shared project from the Share popup.

Each workspace has its own settings area: manage People (roles, pending invitations), rename or leave the workspace, inspect Usage per member, and open Billing as its own section. Owners and admins can filter usage by period, inspect individual AI requests, and understand input, output, and cache credit use. Billing controls stay role-aware: owners and admins manage the workspace plan while members get a clear read-only explanation. Paid features and Upgrade prompts follow the active workspace, so teammates receive the plan their team is actually paying for.

Your personal projects are untouched - everything you've built lives in your personal workspace, exactly as before. And when a project should belong to the team, Move to workspace in the project menu brings it - chats, history, and all.

Playcode's AI model picker just got the newest models from OpenAI and xAI, plus a cleanup so the list stays easy to choose from.

OpenAI GPT-5.6 arrives as three tiers you can pick per task:

• GPT-5.6 Sol - the flagship. Highest quality of the family, for the hardest builds.
• GPT-5.6 Terra - the balanced everyday pick. GPT-5.5-level quality at lower credit use, so it's the new default GPT for most work.
• GPT-5.6 Luna - fast and light. Great for simple pages and quick edits where you'd rather iterate than wait.

Grok 4.5 from xAI joins too - an "Opus-class" model that's fast and unusually token-efficient, so long AI builds tend to cost less.

Each model's picker badge reflects its expected credit use, so you can trade quality for cost with your eyes open. Start on Terra, reach for Sol when a build is genuinely hard, and drop to Luna or Grok 4.5 for quick, cheap passes.

We also retired older models from the picker (earlier GPT-5.x, Grok 4.1, and a few others) so the choices you see are the ones worth using. Nothing you've already built is affected.

The projects dashboard now lets you work on many projects at once - a real help once you have more than a handful.

On desktop, drag a box across empty space to rubber-band a group of projects (it auto-scrolls when you reach the edge), or hold Shift to extend a range. On a phone, tap the checkbox on each card. Once you've selected some, a bar appears with the actions that fit: Move to folder, Archive, or - for already-archived projects - Restore and Delete permanently.

We tidied the dashboard around it, too. Each card now shows whether it's a Static or Cloud project, the filter row carries live counts for your Cloud usage and your Archive, and the views - All, Live, Drafts, Cloud, Archive - moved into one clear switcher at the top while the sidebar stays focused on your folders.

Ask Playcode's AI to check your site's speed and it now runs a real Google PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse) audit on your live page - the same signals Google uses to rank sites.

You get your Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO scores, your Core Web Vitals (Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift, and more), and a ranked list of concrete fixes with estimated time savings. The AI can measure, apply improvements, and measure again to prove your site actually got faster.

Publish your site first, then just ask - for example, "How fast is my site, and how do I speed it up?"

It's a step toward Playcode helping your site succeed, not just get built: fast pages that are ready for Google, all in the same chat.

We rebuilt the storage system behind Playcode Cloud - the layer that keeps your full-stack app's data and files safe while it runs.

The payoff is more predictable performance and stronger reliability, especially for apps that read and write a lot of data. Most of it is invisible by design: your app just runs more smoothly, with fewer surprises under load.

Nothing to change on your side. Existing Cloud apps get it automatically.

Your Cloud terminal now keeps running as long as its tab is open.

Before, switching to another tab and back would drop the session and start a fresh shell - losing whatever was running and your command history. Now you can move between the terminal, preview, and AI Chat freely: the terminal stays connected in the background, and switching back brings you right back to the same session, scrollback and history intact. Dragging the terminal to another panel keeps it too.

Closing the terminal tab still ends the session. And if you leave the whole app for a while, idle terminals disconnect on their own to keep things tidy - reconnecting the moment you come back.

Claude Fable 5 is now selectable in Playcode's AI model picker.

Fable 5 is Anthropic's highest-capability generally available Claude model for demanding reasoning, coding, and long-horizon agent work. It has much higher credit use than Sonnet and Opus models, so the picker shows it as a premium option for the hardest tasks.

Claude Sonnet 5 credit estimates now account for its launch pricing and newer tokenizer together.

The model picker badge and actual credit use are aligned, so Sonnet 5 should no longer overstate expected credits during the introductory pricing window.

Pro mode now starts new chats at Extra High effort when you have not chosen a different default.

This gives the default Quality model more room to reason through multi-step build and debugging work. You can still choose Low, Medium, High, Extra High, or Max from the Intelligence setting when you want to trade speed and credit use for depth.

Claude Sonnet 5 is now the default Quality model in Playcode.

New Pro chats use Sonnet 5 for the Quality path by default. Existing users who were following the previous default move with the Quality setting automatically, so they do not need to change anything in Preferences.

Opus 4.6 remains available in the model picker for work where you explicitly want Opus.

Claude Sonnet 5 is now selectable in Playcode's AI model picker.

It is a new Sonnet option for builders who want a stronger balanced model without jumping all the way to Opus. Sonnet 5 uses Anthropic's newer tokenizer, and the model picker badge accounts for expected credit use.

Opus 4.6 remains the default Quality model for now while we watch Sonnet 5 on real website-building work.

Pro Quality mode now runs directly on Claude Opus 4.6 with extended thinking turned on. It's noticeably more stable and consistent on longer, multi-step work, and the model is shown by name in the AI Model picker and your usage history.

Nothing to change on your side - Quality just gets the upgrade. The Intelligence dial still tunes how hard it thinks per task, and Economy mode stays the fast, lightweight lane.

When you ask the AI to recreate a design from a screenshot, check how a page looks, or work with an image, it now sees the actual picture - not just a link to it.

Before, the AI could take a screenshot but sometimes couldn't really look at it, so it would capture the same page over and over without making progress. That's fixed. Now it looks once and gets to work.

What the AI can see now:

• Screenshots it takes of a live page - so it can clone a design you point it at, or check that your published site looks right.
• Images it generates or edits - it sees its own result, so it can judge it and refine instead of working blind.
• Any image you give it a link to - paste an image URL and ask the AI to describe it, match its style, or build from it.

It also accepts more image formats automatically (including AVIF) and resizes large images for you, so you don't have to convert anything first.

Pro mode now lets you choose how much the AI thinks before it answers. Open the mode picker in the chat and set an Intelligence level for the task in front of you:

• Low / Medium - quick answers for simple edits, with less waiting
• High (the default) - the balanced setting that fits most work
• Extra High / Max - let the model reason longer on hard, multi-step problems

Set it per chat from the mode picker, or choose a default for every new chat in Preferences > AI Model > Default Intelligence. Economy mode stays the fast, simple lane, so there's no dial to think about there.

Also in this release

• No more blank Pro replies - on rare occasions a Pro answer could come back empty; those now retry automatically instead of showing nothing.

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