docs(blog): cover the terminal agent in the 4.8 post (#11372)

docs(blog): cover the terminal agent, and fix the counts in the intro

The 4.8 post never mentions that `local-ai chat` stopped being a REPL
and became an agent (#11291): the nib harness compiled into the binary,
with tool use behind an approval gate, sub-agents, MCP servers, plugins
and skills, auto-configured against the local instance. It also ships a
shell integration script for zsh, bash and fish that binds Ctrl+Space.

That is one of the larger user-facing changes in the release and it was
missing from both the post and the release-notes highlights. Added a
section after 3D generation, including the breaking changes for anyone
who had habits around the old REPL: `/clear` is gone in favour of
`/compact`, and a model switch now keeps the conversation.

While in the intro, corrected the counts. The post said 374 pull
requests in twenty-one days, which was accurate when it was drafted on
the 4th but not once v4.8.0 was tagged on the 5th. The published release
notes say 386 in twenty-two days, and the intro now matches them rather
than contradicting them.

For the record, neither figure is exactly right: `git log --format=%s
v4.7.1..v4.8.0 | grep -cE '\(#[0-9]+\)$'` counts 388 squash-merged pull
requests, and 389 from v4.7.0. The notes were cut before the last few
landed. Matching the published notes was the priority here, since that
is the artifact everyone else quotes, and 386 is the number already in
circulation.


Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5 [Claude Code]

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Co-authored-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>

Author: localai-bot

website/content/blog/what-landed-in-localai-4-8.md

@@ -3,12 +3,12 @@ title: "What landed in LocalAI 4.8"
 date: 2026-08-04
 author: "Ettore Di Giacinto"
 category: "Release"
-tags: ["release", "vllm.cpp", "audio.cpp", "3d", "gallery", "distributed", "performance"]
-summary: "A new inference engine, 3D generation, one backend that serves six audio endpoints, and a web interface 3.48x lighter. 374 pull requests in twenty-one days."
+tags: ["release", "vllm.cpp", "audio.cpp", "3d", "agent", "gallery", "distributed", "performance"]
+summary: "A new inference engine, a terminal agent in the CLI, 3D generation, and a web interface 3.48x lighter. 386 pull requests in twenty-two days."
 extracss: ["blog.css"]
 ---
 
-LocalAI 4.8.0 is out, after twenty-one days and 374 merged pull requests. There are three new things LocalAI can do, and a lot of repair work on things it already did.
+LocalAI 4.8.0 is out, after twenty-two days and 386 merged pull requests. There are four new things LocalAI can do, and a lot of repair work on things it already did.
 
 The full notes list everything. This post covers the parts that change what you do day to day, with the pull request numbers so you can read the diffs.
 
@@ -144,6 +144,20 @@ The first engine behind it is `trellis2cpp`, an image-to-3D backend over TRELLIS
 <figcaption>trellis2-4b, 2,502,928 vertices and 5,012,118 triangles, turning in the browser. The remesh slider below it is the print path.</figcaption>
 </figure>
 
+## `local-ai chat` stopped being a REPL
+
+`local-ai chat` used to be a chat prompt in a terminal. It is now an agent, and it is the [nib](https://github.com/mudler/nib) harness compiled straight into the binary: tool use behind an approval gate, sub-agents, MCP servers, plugins and skills, auto-configured against your own instance. Nothing extra to install.
+
+```bash
+local-ai chat                      # the agent, pointed at your models
+echo "what is 2+2" | local-ai chat --cli
+local-ai chat --init zsh           # Ctrl+Space from any shell prompt
+```
+
+That last one prints a shell integration script (zsh, bash or fish), so you can pull the agent up from wherever you already are instead of opening something else.
+
+It runs shell commands now, so every tool call goes through an approval prompt you control, and read-only ones like `ls` and `cat` run without asking. If you had habits around the old REPL, a few things moved: `/clear` is gone and `/compact` is the closest thing, `/models` and `/model <name>` mean what they always meant, and switching model keeps the conversation instead of starting over ([#11291](https://github.com/mudler/LocalAI/pull/11291)).
+
 ## One backend, six audio endpoints
 
 The usual shape for audio is one backend per model family, which means a process per capability and a config file for each. `audio-cpp` wraps [audio.cpp](https://github.com/0xShug0/audio.cpp), a multi-family ggml audio engine. One backend process serves several unrelated families through a single runtime vocabulary, and works out which family a checkpoint belongs to from the GGUF's own `audiocpp.model_spec.family` metadata key. There is nothing backend-specific to write in the model config.