---
title: "Updates: what we promise never breaks · intentic docs"
description: "What an intentic update can never touch: your files survive every update and rollback, updates are offered rather than forced, breaking changes are flagged before you take them, and every release soaks on the beta lane before stable."
url: "https://intentic.dev/docs/updates/"
updated: "2026-08-10"
---

Run a sandbox

# Updates: what we promise never breaks

intentic ships several times a day. These are the promises every one of those updates keeps — what an update can never touch, how you find out when something will change, and the way back when one turns out badly.

**On this page (4 sections)**

- [The promises](#the-promises)
- [The two lanes](#the-two-lanes)
- [What can change freely](#what-can-change-freely)
- [If an update went badly anyway](#if-an-update-went-badly-anyway)

## The promises

- **Your files are never touched.** Everything in your workspace — code, notes, agent history — lives outside the software that updates. Updating, rolling back, and rebuilding all keep it, and we drill exactly that against real releases every night: a sandbox is updated, rolled back, and force-failed mid-update, and the files must come through all three.
- **Updates are offered, never forced.** A new release shows up as a card in your workspace saying what's in it, in plain words. Nothing updates while you're not looking, and nothing interrupts an agent mid-task without you choosing it.
- **The worst outcome of an update is the sandbox you already had.** An update that can't come up healthy puts your previous sandbox back by itself. And every update keeps one step back: if the new version misbehaves, rollback is a single command, offered right on the same card.
- **Breaking changes are flagged before you take them, not after.** When an update removes or changes something you may rely on, its card stops looking routine: it turns into a warning that says what stops working and what to do instead, and asks you to read that before it hands over the update command. The [changelog](https://intentic.dev/changelog/) carries the same lines under a Breaking badge.
- **Nothing we ship can take your data hostage.** The sandbox runs on your hardware and your state is plain files on your disk. Stop updating, roll back, or leave entirely — everything you made is already yours, readable without us.

## The two lanes

Every release lands on the **beta** lane the moment it publishes. The **stable** lane — the default, and what every download link serves — only moves onto a release after it has soaked on beta for about two days with nothing superseding it. We run beta ourselves, so a bad release is caught by the people who made it, not by you.

Your sandbox shows its lane on the update card. Moving to beta is one command on the machine that runs your sandbox — and moving back is the same command with `stable`:

```
ic sandbox update --channel beta
```

## What can change freely

The circle of promises is deliberately small, and everything outside it can improve without ceremony: how screens look, how features work internally, defaults for things you haven't set. A changelog entry tells you when a change is worth noticing; the warning treatment is reserved for the changes that take something away — so that when you see one, it means it.

## If an update went badly anyway

Open the update card and take the rollback it offers — your files stay as they are now, only the software moves back. If a settings file then reads as unreadable, that's usually the older version looking at a newer file, and the notice will say so rather than asking you to fix a file that isn't broken; updating again reads it fine.

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