Tensegrity

Three changes in 5.0. Each clears a blocker.

Historical note, added August 2026. This post describes conexus 5.0 as it shipped in May 2026, and several things it names have since been retired. ChromaDB is no longer a live substrate in any mode: 6.0 moved the permanent store to a bundled PostgreSQL 17 with pgvector served by a native engine, and the dependency was removed outright in July 2026. Client-side Voyage credentials were retired in 7.3.0, so the nx config set voyage_api_key step below no longer applies; embedding is server-side now, and a default local install embeds on-device with a bundled 768-dimensional model requiring no account. Read this as a record of that release rather than as setup instructions. For a current install see Installing Nexus.

The rename

The Claude Code plugin moved from nx to conexus. Slash commands followed: /conexus:research, /conexus:rdr-gate, and the rest. Install:

/plugin marketplace add Hellblazer/nexus
/plugin install conexus@nexus-plugins

Nx (the JS monorepo tool) shipped a Claude Code plugin under the same name in Q1. Renamed.

The PyPI package was already conexus. The CLI binary stays nx. Only the plugin namespace changed.

For existing installs, the migration is two Claude Code commands:

/plugin install conexus@nexus-plugins
/reload-plugins

Install registers the new plugin under its renamed name; reload activates it. Optionally /plugin uninstall nx@nexus-plugins afterwards drops the stale entry — leaving it costs nothing but the rename isn’t fully clean until it goes. nx doctor and the MCP server startup keep warning plugin_name_mismatch until install + reload both run.

Indexed code, RDRs, memory, catalog: unaffected.

Claude Desktop chat

Claude Desktop chat now has a .mcpb Desktop Extension. Download conexus.mcpb from the latest release, double-click, and it lands under Settings → Connectors → Desktop as “Conexus”. First launch resolves the dependency stack via uv (~20s) and auto-installs the host T2 daemon; subsequent starts are ~5s.

Prerequisite: uv on PATH. brew install uv or pipx install uv.

This is for Claude Desktop users without Claude Code. Claude Code users already get Nexus in Claude Desktop chat via their existing plugin.

Cowork uses the Claude Code plugin via Anthropic’s SDK transport. State round-trips with the host CLI through the same daemon. Nothing additional to install.

docs/desktop-deployment.md covers install, first-run, drift detection, and uninstall across all three surfaces.

Stable releases

.claude-plugin/marketplace.json now uses the git-subdir source form with per-plugin tag and sha pinning:

"source": {
  "source": "git-subdir",
  "url": "https://github.com/Hellblazer/nexus.git",
  "path": "conexus",
  "ref": "v5.0.0",
  "sha": "<40-char>"
}

Installs follow the pinned tag, not main. CI enforces parity between version and source.ref, so a partial bump can’t ship. Release commits go through a release/vX.Y.Z branch and a PR instead of direct-to-main.

Smaller fixes in the same release

• post-commit hook stanza gained a pgrep guard. Stops reindexer pile-ups under burst-commit workloads. nx hooks update migrates existing installs; nx doctor flags stale stanzas.
• Cloud credentials in shell env aren’t visible to GUI-spawned subprocesses. nx doctor now prints the nx config set commands to persist them so Claude Desktop and Cowork can see them.
• nx-mcp startup auto-installs the T2 daemon if missing. Idempotent; existing LaunchAgent/systemd units are left alone.

Migration summary

# 1. Upgrade the CLI
uv tool upgrade conexus

# 2. (Claude Code users) Pick up the rename — both commands required
/plugin install conexus@nexus-plugins
/reload-plugins

# 3. Refresh the post-commit hook if you installed it
nx hooks update .

# 4. Persist cloud credentials if you only had them in shell env
nx config set chroma_api_key "$CHROMA_API_KEY"
nx config set voyage_api_key "$VOYAGE_API_KEY"
nx config set chroma_tenant "$CHROMA_TENANT"
nx config set chroma_database "$CHROMA_DATABASE"

# 5. (Claude Desktop chat users) Install the .mcpb
# Download conexus.mcpb from the latest GitHub release; double-click.

nx doctor lists any of these that still need attention after the upgrade.

What did not change

• T2 memory, T3 collections, catalog, RDR history, plan library
• The nx CLI binary
• The PyPI package conexus
• The marketplace name nexus-plugins
• The MCP server names nexus and nexus-catalog
• Cowork integration

5.0 is structural. Product work lands in 5.1.

CHANGELOG | docs/desktop-deployment.md | Release notes