Wing 12.1 Beta: Autonomous Development

Wing 12.1 is now available as a beta release. It introduces guided autonomous development. You specify the goals, answer questions, and review results. AI agents design and write the code, unit tests, and documentation. Wing keeps you in control. Wing Pro 12.1 now supports Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Copilot, Cursor, goose, OpenCode, and other ACP-compatible AI coding agents. It also adds a new Modern look and display themes, graphical revision control history, and many other improvements. The latest beta, Wing 12.1.1, redesigns the New Project dialog, simplifies first start and licensing, adds GitHub integration, and fixes many bugs.

Downloads

This is a beta release. Please try it and email us if you find problems or have suggestions!

Wing 12.1.1 -- Full-featured Python IDE with two licensing tiers

Wing 101 12.1.1 -- Free IDE for teaching beginners to program

Wing 12.1 will replace Wing 12.0 when it is installed. You can revert to Wing 12.0 by reinstalling it at any time.

To get started quickly with autonomous development in Wing 12.1, see Getting Started with Autonomous Development.

New in Wing 12.1.1

New Project: The New Project dialog has been redesigned as a single page. Its Simple view asks only for the essentials, with a new directory, a virtualenv in the project's .venv, and a git repository as defaults, while All Options shows everything else. Progress is shown as a checklist in the dialog, and a failed step can be retried. Support for uv, Poetry, pipenv, micromamba, and pixi environments has been improved, and Wing offers to install a missing uv, Poetry, or pipenv. A FastAPI preset was added.

GitHub (Wing Pro and Wing Classic): You can now sign in to GitHub, clone from a list of your repositories, and publish a new project to GitHub from New Project. Push Changes in the Project Status view pushes your work, and first merges any remote changes with the help of an AI agent.

Startup: The first start of Wing is simpler. A shorter Set Up Wing dialog shows all the display themes and lets you choose how New Project starts out, and new installations default to the Modern Dark look. The Welcome to Wing window now leads with New Project, Open Folder, and Clone from GitHub. Wing offers to install Python if it finds no supported version. It checks for updates the first time a new version starts, and restarts right away after an update is installed.

Licensing (Wing Pro and Wing Classic): Trials now start automatically, with no sign-up, and all the license dialogs have been merged into one.

Tasks and AI Agents (Wing Pro): Tasks can be sent to Wing on other machines and to other projects, set up as peers, for example to check or fix something on another OS. Agent sessions and the Tasks Manager continue on their own once a usage limit resets. Send Note sends a message into a running task's session, and the Manager or an agent can address Revise requests and review comments. The Plan, Up Next, Review, and History views have been improved, and task tracking and commits by the Tasks Manager are more reliable.

Other Changes: Editors have a new Show Rendered toggle for Markdown, reST, HTML, SVG, and images. Wing Tips and the feedback dialog sometimes shown when quitting have been removed. Wing 12.1.1 also fixes remote host connections that froze or dropped on slow links, failures and stalls in setting up a new project's environment, and many other bugs.

New in Wing 12.1

Autonomous Development with the Tasks Manager

The new Tasks Manager is an agent that runs the Tasks tool's queues for you, so that development proceeds autonomously under your direction. You write tasks, mark the ones you want started as Ready, and review the results.

The Manager accepts anything from a bug report to a high-level specification for a new software project. It can break down larger tasks into a design and development plan. It decides task order, serializes those that are likely to edit the same files, and runs closely related tasks in shared session context. It can message a running agent to tell it about related work or new insights, or redirect it if it goes astray.

While the Manager is on, tasks run autonomously: Rather than stopping to ask questions or present intermediate results, each works as far as it can and ends with a report of the judgement calls it made along the way, and any questions it has left. A new Questions tab in the Tasks tool collects everything that is waiting for you, so you can provide answers in one place. Follow-up work and problems that agents notice as they run are added to the Plan tab of the Tasks tool as new tasks. The Manager may automatically start found tasks that are closely related to ongoing work; others wait for your review.

You stay in control of which work runs, how much the Manager can do, and how results are reviewed. Every change the Manager makes is listed and can be reverted or revised, even after changes have been committed. You can also talk to the Manager to ask about the status of development or give it special instructions about your development workflow.

Claude Code and Codex are best for autonomous development, since they self-check the safety of commands that they run. Antigravity, Copilot, and Cursor also work but don't implement the same level of safety checks. See AI Agent Safety in the AI Agent-Assisted Development chapter of the manual in Wing 12.1's Help menu for details and safety recommendations.

The Manager agent itself and queues in the Tasks tool can each use a different agent. You bring your own subscriptions or API keys for the agents you choose. Wing does not install agents or provide access to models.

Other Improvements

Your Choice of AI Agent: Wing 12.1 adds support for other AI agents, now including Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Copilot, Cursor, goose, and OpenCode, either using their Textual User Interfaces (TUIs) or the Agent Client Protocol (ACP).

User Interface: An optional new Modern look redesigns the toolbar, Preferences dialog, status bar, and tab overflow, and improves the display font. A welcome window lets you choose what to open at startup. Two new display themes, Night Flight and Solo Flight, have been added. Themes can now incorporate transparent colors, be imported from VS Code, created from a small set of colors, or exported from your current color configuration.

Tasks Tool (Wing Pro): Goals can be set aside for Later, and the Focus mode keeps just one goal open at a time. A new Incoming view collects tasks that agents found or proposed, for quick triage, and the Up Next view on the Execute tab shows what runs next in every queue. Tasks that agents made are marked with where they came from, and a Compact button shows one line per task. New Checklists hold recurring reviews, fixes, and release and deployment steps. A task's committed changes can now be reverted, edited, or commented on. Every task has a short ID that links to the task wherever it is cited, and mini-search works on every tab. Tracking of changes made by concurrently running tasks is more reliable, and there are many other fixes to task and session management.

Version Control (Wing Pro and Wing Classic): The git and mercurial logs now show a graphical history with expandable diffs, Project Log replaces Show Changeset, and the editor can show annotations with commit message tooltips.

Editor and Analysis: In all products, the editor's scroll bar shows marks for diffs, search matches, and errors and warnings. Source analysis is faster and its database is about 30% smaller.

Other Changes: Wing now offers to remove large cache directories left behind by older versions. Accept Debug Connections has moved to Project Properties so it is set per project. Wing 12.1 also includes many bug fixes, particularly for remote development and Docker containers, debugging free-threaded Python on Windows, git worktrees and submodules, non-ASCII text on Windows, unit test discovery, and display themes.

See the change log for details.

Getting Started with Autonomous Development

To get started quickly with autonomous development in Wing 12.1, see Getting Started with Autonomous Development.

If you have questions, please don't hesitate to contact us at support@wingware.com.