First run, defaults, visual hierarchy, task finales, website / community front door, contributor guidance, and release smoke feel composed, legible, and exact. The project's visual identity locks in: an orange / blue / white work-state palette against a dark navy / near-black background, used to encode state rather than decorate. Drop the legacy deepseek and deepseek-tui binary shims now that the rename has baked through the v0.8.x line.

In scope

• First-run wizard. A short structured wizard for new users: provider setup (DeepSeek, Hugging Face Inference Providers, OpenRouter, or a local runtime via the Serving Workset path), model choice, execution-mode default (Plan / Agent / YOLO), --model auto opt-in, theme, optional memory-store opt-in, optional verifier opt-in. Replaces an unguided "just start typing" first turn.

• Control panel polish. /config becomes a control panel: modes, permissions, provider, model, thinking, memory, MCP, theme — every setting inspectable, adjustable, and accompanied by a "what does this do?" line.

• Visual direction (project identity). The orange / blue / white work-state palette (against dark navy / near-black background) becomes the project's visual identity. The palette encodes state, not decoration:

  • Blue owns frame, control, selection, borders, taskbar, stable system state.
  • White owns readable content, primary text, final answers, clean surfaces.
  • Orange owns active reasoning, live progress, Fin wakeup/verifier checks, warnings, and goal momentum — appears only when Brother Whale is actively doing something.
  • Dark navy / near-black is the background that keeps the palette crisp instead of loud.

  The feeling is crisp, cold, useful, kinetic — not a sports-brand parody, not gradient overload. Restraint is the brief. Affordance, not nostalgia. Other themes still ship; this one becomes the default.

• Shim-drop. Remove [[bin]] deepseek from crates/cli/Cargo.toml and [[bin]] deepseek-tui from crates/tui/Cargo.toml. Drop npm/deepseek-tui/ package directory. Drop deepseek-artifacts-sha256.txt alias from release.yml; stop building deepseek-* release assets. Drop CODEWHALE_*=DEEPSEEK_TUI_* legacy env-var aliases (TUI-brand vars only — DeepSeek API vars stay forever).

• Governance + community docs. GOVERNANCE.md (decision rights, trust boundary), SPONSORSHIP.md (how sponsorship works, what it does not buy — no preferential merging, no "powered by" branding without explicit maintainer approval), SUPPORT.md (where to ask for help). security@codewhale.net security inbox listed in SECURITY.md. Issue templates refreshed.

• Public positioning. README + landing page frame the project precisely: CodeWhale is an agentic terminal workbench for open-source and open-weight coding models. DeepSeek is first-class; Hugging Face Inference Providers and OpenRouter serve as the open-model discovery and routing layer; vLLM, SGLang, Ollama, and TGI cover local serving. Historical CHANGELOG entries untouched.

Out of scope (kept forever)

• ~/.deepseek/ user config directory name.
• DeepSeek API env vars (DEEPSEEK_API_KEY, DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL, DEEPSEEK_MODEL, DEEPSEEK_PROVIDER).
• api.deepseek.com, api.deepseeki.com.
• Model IDs (deepseek-v4-pro, deepseek-v4-flash).
• ProviderKind::Deepseek enum + "deepseek" provider string.
• Historical CHANGELOG entries.
• CNB mirror namespace.

Definition of done

• Fresh install via npm install -g codewhale or cargo install codewhale-cli ships codewhale and codewhale-tui binaries; no deepseek shim present.
• First-run wizard runs cleanly for a new user and produces a working setup (provider key for DeepSeek / HF / OpenRouter / local, default execution mode, theme).
• /config opens the control panel; every entry has a "what does this do?" line.
• The orange / blue / white work-state palette is the default theme; alternate themes still ship.
• GOVERNANCE.md, SPONSORSHIP.md, SUPPORT.md live and linked from README.
• README provider matrix lists DeepSeek + HF + OpenRouter + the local-runtime path with clear "what each is for" framing.
• A new user sees codewhale-named welcome surfaces with zero legacy strings.

Release gate

• Parity gates green.
• CHANGELOG.md [0.8.48] thanks contributors to the v0.8.x DeepSeek-TUI line; frames v0.8.48 as the brand-consolidation + workbench-affordance milestone.
• Release notes document the binary removal explicitly (running deepseek produces a shell "command not found" — no in-binary message because there is no binary).