0.12.12 — Vision gets its first token faster

Released 2026-08-13 · full changelog · GitHub releases

Upgrade: pip install -U rapid-mlx · brew upgrade rapid-mlx · or grab the desktop app.

A vision-lane performance release plus resilience: streaming vision requests stop rebuilding the tokenizer vocab on every call, model loads can no longer hang on a cold network, and the desktop app gains signed background updates.

Vision first-token latency drops sharply. The output-router detection that runs on every streaming request was rebuilding the full tokenizer vocab (~262k entries on Gemma) on each call; it is now detected once and memoized, and the MLLM scheduler wakes on an event instead of a 10 ms idle poll. gemma-3 image requests that previously returned an empty completion (or crashed) now answer correctly (#1909).
Model loads no longer hang on a cold network. Warm starts could stall on unbounded Hugging Face metadata calls; the loader now hands a local snapshot path to the model, so an offline or poisoned-DNS start can’t wedge the server (#1908, #1888).
Streaming errors tell the truth. MLLM streaming preflight errors return HTTP 400 instead of a silent 200 with empty content (#1897).
Scheduler & caches. Batch-adaptive recurrent-barrier interval for single-stream decode (#1895); hybrid sliding/full KV caches keep their per-layer cache class when trimmed (#1863); image/video models are single-slot residents so they stop accumulating in memory (#1889).
Catalog. Ling-3.0-tiny gains block-FP8 checkpoint support (#1910).
Desktop. Signed background updates via Sparkle (#1907); streaming aligned with native chat (#1906); conversation search in the sidebar (#1879); global and per-conversation custom instructions (#1883); Launch integrations derived from the engine registry (#1894).

@guo — release-pipeline hardening: PF-2 secrets gate, and the GitHub Release created last, after the updater pointer (#1859, #1891)
@osdodo — desktop conversation search, custom instructions, and Sparkle signed background updates (#1879, #1883, #1907)
@xiaoxiunique — desktop streaming aligned with native chat (#1906)
@loriz-art — core workspace unified with the Direction D visual system (#1905)
@Jevin-F — model loads no longer hang on unbounded Hugging Face metadata calls (#1908)
@aftersnow — Ling-3.0-tiny block-FP8 support (#1910)