Kiln Desktop - v0.22.0

Agents, Subtasks, Local RAG, MCP improvements, and more!

What's New

• Agents / Subtasks: You can now build agentic systems in Kiln! Any Kiln task can be made into a tool, allowing you to create a hierarchy of agents. See our docs for details
• Local + Open RAG: Our Search Tools / RAG system now supports local and open models. Use models like Qwen VL for extracting documents, and models like Gemma Embedding for embeddings.
• Save your Run Configuration & Set Default: Our Run tab now allows you to save a specific run configuration (model, prompt, parameters). This makes it easy to jump between configs. Set your preferred config as "Default", which will load automatically.
• Tools & MCP Updates: fixed a bug impacting some MCP servers on Windows, better error messages when a MCP servers errors
• New Models: Sonnet 4.5, GLM 4.6, GLM 4.5 Vision, Mistral Medium 3.1, Qwen 3 VL, Qwen 2.5 VL
• And More: UI improvements, faster tagging on large datasets, tagging UI shows all tags you've used, simplified onboarding, new intro

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/18282462999
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/18282463177

Full Changelog: v0.21.1...v0.22.0

v0.21.1

Our biggest update ever adds RAG (search tools), a document library, and synthetic data V3!

What's New

• RAG & Search: Build a state-of-the art RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems in under 3 minute by drag-and-dropping files into Kiln. It supports powerful RAG tool including model-based document extraction, many embedding models, and hybrid search (vector + BM25). You can customize and tune any element of the pipeline.
• Synthetic Data V3: Our synthetic data generation has a new more powerful design. Walk-through data-generation step by step and review model outputs before saving to your dataset.
• New 'Trace' UI: New UI visualizes all steps of AI calls, including tool-calls/responses, and internal thinking steps.
• Document Library: Interactive UI for managing documents as part of your AI project. Add tags, view extractions, and more. Supports documents, images, audio, and video.
• New Models: Qwen 3 Max, Qwen 3 Next, Kimi K2 0905, Seed OSS 36B, Step3
• And More: UI improvements, embedding models, LanceDB integration, llama_index integration, and more

Note: v0.21.1 is a minor update over v0.21.0 only changing the internal version number for app updates (which was missed in v0.21.0). Release notes above reflect changes v0.20.1 to v0.21.1

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/17954978555
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/17954978563

Full Changelog: v0.20.1...v0.21.1

v0.21.0

Our biggest update ever adds RAG (search tools), a document library, and synthetic data V3!

What's New

• RAG & Search: Build a state-of-the art RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems in under 3 minute by drag-and-dropping files into Kiln. It supports powerful RAG tool including model-based document extraction, many embedding models, and hybrid search (vector + BM25). You can customize and tune any element of the pipeline.
• Synthetic Data V3: Our synthetic data generation has a new more powerful design. Walk-through data-generation step by step and review model outputs before saving to your dataset.
• New 'Trace' UI: New UI visualizes all steps of AI calls, including tool-calls/responses, and internal thinking steps.
• Document Library: Interactive UI for managing documents as part of your AI project. Add tags, view extractions, and more. Supports documents, images, audio, and video.
• New Models: Qwen 3 Max, Qwen 3 Next, Kimi K2 0905, Seed OSS 36B, Step3
• And More: UI improvements, embedding models, LanceDB integration, llama_index integration, and more

Note this release has a minor bug (incorrect internal version number, causing it to ask to upgrade). V0.21.1 has a fix, and upgrading to it will resolve the issue.

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/17917294586
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/17917294422

Full Changelog: v0.20.1...v0.21.0

Kiln Desktop - v0.20.1

What's New

• Tools & MCP: Kiln now supports tool calling via MCP. We've included some example servers such as web search, web scraping, python interpreter, and more. You can connect any MCP server to Kiln to improve the performance of you AI tasks.
• New AI Providers: Docker Model Runner - run models locally, in a container
• New Models: GLM 4.5 & 4.5 Air, GPT 5 on OpenRouter
• Linux Installer: New script to download Kiln and add it to your app launcher
• And More: many UI improvements, internal "traces" for multi-step chains (like tools)

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/17584717823
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/49949527854

New Contributors

• @ilopezluna made their first contribution in #473
• @sfierro made their first contribution in #530

Full Changelog: v0.19.1...v0.20.1

Kiln Desktop - v0.19.1

What's Changed

• Model Library: Browse all available models and their supported capabilities in our new model library.
• New AI Providers: Cerebras, SiliconFlow.cn
• New Models: GPT-5, GPT OSS, GLM, Qwen 3 2507, MiniMax, Hunyuan, Pangu Pro
• Better internationalization: Allow non-ascii characters in our model names, names and descriptions.
• And More: fine-tuning UI improvements, native file-picker for importing projects, design updates, bug fixes

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/16840409052
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/16840408959

Full Changelog: v0.18.1...v0.19.1

Kiln Desktop - v0.18.1

Overview: Evals V2, Synthetic Data Gen V2, Kiln 'Issues' New Models, and More!

• Evals V2: Our evals are now more powerful and easier to use. Features include simplified eval creation, improved prompts, eval templates, a new "compare" view to find the best model, and more!
• Synthetic Data V2: The data generation tool has been redesigned to cover more use cases, including fine-tuning, eval data, issue resolution, and more. The UI has been improved and simplified.
• Introducing 'Issues': Kiln Issues are like software bugs, but for AI systems. Describe an issue, create an eval for it, generate data to reproduce it, and fix it with tuning or prompting.
• New Models: Added Kimi K2, Grok 4, Llama 4, R1 0528, and more! We can now publish new models over the air, so no more waiting for the next release.
• Improved UI: Added type-to-filter functionality in dropdowns like model selection, plus more model suggestions.
• Bug Fixes: Fixed an issue related to how model outputs are sent to eval judges.

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/16310037457
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/16310037455

Full Changelog: v0.17.0...v0.18.1

Kiln Desktop - v0.17.0

• Synthetic Data UX Improvements: Your synthetic data session is now preserved; you can leave and come back without losing data. Visual updates make synthetic data easier to use.
• Powerful new logs: View the exact requests/responses sent to/from LLM providers. You can open the logs folder from settings in app. Useful for understanding workflows, debugging, or productionizing Kiln tasks.
• New parameters: top_p, temperature, structured output mode: specify key LLM parameters both on the run screen, and during evals when trying to find the best method of running your task. Structured output mode let's you try different methods of enforcing data structure (JSON schema, tool calls, instructions)
• Much more: bug fixes, usability improvements, model list updates, CoT in fewer messages.

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/15665812199
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/15665812198

Full Changelog: v0.16.0...v0.17.0

Kiln Desktop - v0.16.0

• New Models: Qwen 3 and Gemma 3 including the ability to run /no_think or /think for Qwen 3
• Major Redesign for Evals: Creating an eval now walks you through each step of the process with an intuitive UI. Building your dataset, rate golden data, compare eval algorithms, and more. You can create state of the art evals without prior experience.
• Improved fine-tuning: it's now easier to create fine-tuning datasets and manage existing datasets.
• Many quality of life improvements: new prompt generator, suggested models for evals/data-gen, improved UI controls, simpler setup

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/15085724878
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/15085835381

Full Changelog: v0.15.0...v0.16.0

Kiln Desktop - v0.15.0

⬇️ Download links in the "Assets" section below ⬇️

This release includes:

• New Models: GPT 4.1 Full/Mini/Nano, o4 mini, o3, and Gemini 2.5 Pro/Flash.
• Gemini Fine-Tuning: connect a Google Vertex account to fine-tune Gemini models.
• Faster Synthetic Data Gen: generate data for all topics in a single click.
• New UI which allows manually repairing data
• Fix a bug breaking some chain-of-thought prompts

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/14617773103
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/14617773044

Full Changelog: v0.14.0...v0.15.0

Kiln Desktop - v0.14.0

⬇️ Download links in the "Assets" section below ⬇️

This release adds a ton of new integrations including 5 new AI providers, 5 new inference models, 3 new fine-tune base-models

• Added over 60 new fine-tuneable models like QwQ, Deepseek V3, Llama 3.3, Qwen 2.5, and more. These use Fireworks AI, and don't require setting up custom GPUs.
• Added the ability to deploy on-demand inference servers for Fireworks AI. These deployments will automatically scale to zero servers after 5 minutes of inactivity, making it easy to keep costs down. When you go to use a model, a server will automatically start for you.
• Bug fix blocking connecting Anthropic keys to Kiln

CI Build Source for this release Mac and Linux: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/14285733084
CI Build Source for this release Windows: /Kiln-AI/Kiln/actions/runs/14285733097

Full Changelog: v0.13.2...v0.14.0