064. The first start of more agents on Windows, and four that write to the real profile

Date

2026-10-31

Agents

Aider, Goose, OpenHands CLI, Kiro CLI, Junie CLI, Codebuff, Qoder CLI, CodeBuddy Code, Letta Code, Neovate Code, Every Code, iFlow CLI, Mistral Vibe, gptme, Open Interpreter

Measured on

CI runner windows-2022 (x64), CI runner windows-2025 (x64) and CI runner windows-11-arm (arm64)

Measured

2026-10-31, the scenario scenarios/first-run-windows.py <agent> <command> in the scenarios workflow (run 41153462586, and runs 41155667724, 41151440753 and 41149533184), in a pseudo console of 120 x 40, with USERPROFILE, HOME, APPDATA, LOCALAPPDATA, TEMP and TMP in a throwaway folder, no login and no key. scenarios/install-windows-agents.ps1 installed the agents of groups c and d:

Measured on: CI runner windows-2022 (x64), CI runner windows-2025 (x64) and CI runner windows-11-arm (arm64).

What was measured

1. These agents started and showed the same first question as on Linux (fact 61, fact 46) on the three images: Junie CLI, Qoder CLI, CodeBuddy Code, Letta Code and Open Interpreter. Codebuff, Every Code, Aider, OpenHands CLI, Mistral Vibe and Goose did the same on the two x64 images. Aider asked "No git repo found, create one to track aider's changes (recommended)? (Y)es/(N)o [Yes]:".
2. Some screens differ from Linux:
   • Kiro CLI shows "You are not logged in. Login now?" with "> Yes" and "No", as on macos-26-intel (fact 61), on the three images.
   • iFlow CLI draws IFLOW in large block letters above its header box, in place of the small logo at the left of the box on Linux.
   • Neovate Code draws its list bullets as "*", not "•".
   • gptme asks "New conversation or load previous?" with "0: New conversation", "1: Load more" and "Select option number:", in place of a menu with a mark (x64 only).
3. Four agents wrote to the real profile folders, not to the throwaway home, on each image where they started:
   • Open Interpreter: 21 changes in %USERPROFILE%\.openinterpreter (config.toml, installation_id, version.json, .tmp, skills, and the SQLite files state_5, logs_2, goals_1, memories_1 and queue_1 with -wal and -shm), as Codex CLI does (fact 53).
   • Every Code: %USERPROFILE%\.code with debug_logs and version.json.
   • Junie CLI: %USERPROFILE%\.junie with settings.json, history.jsonl, sessions, processes, instances, versions, misc and logs.
   • Kiro CLI: %USERPROFILE%\.kiro\settings.
4. The other new agents made no change in the real profile, or only changes that also happen with no agent (fact 55): CodeBuddy Code, Letta Code, Neovate Code, Qoder CLI, Codebuff, Mistral Vibe, gptme, OpenHands CLI, Goose and opencode 2 (fact 63). iFlow CLI changed the folder %USERPROFILE%\.iflow, which existed before the start.
5. Processes and folders:
   • Kiro CLI runs as one process kiro-cli.exe from %LOCALAPPDATA%\Kiro-Cli. The installer prints "installed to C:\Program Files\Kiro-Cli", but the file is not there. The x64 MSI installed and ran on windows-11-arm too.
   • Junie CLI runs as cmd.exe /d /c ...\.local\bin\junie.bat, then junie.exe and a second junie.exe, from %USERPROFILE%\.local\share\junie\versions\3893.6\junie\.
   • Codebuff runs as node ...\codebuff\index.js with a child codebuff.exe from .config\manicode\ of the throwaway home. A powershell.exe that is not below the driver writes a file in the throwaway folder ([System.IO.File]::WriteAllText(...)).
   • Every Code runs as node ...\coder.js with a child code-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.exe from AppData\Local\just-every\code\0.6.196\ of the throwaway home. Its --version printed "Installing @just-every/code v0.6.196 for x86_64-pc-windows-msvc..." on both calls.
   • Mistral Vibe runs as eight processes: vibe.exe, two Python processes, vibe-rs.exe, vibe-app-server.exe and two more Python processes.
6. Installs that failed:
   • On windows-11-arm, uv tool install of aider-chat, openhands, gptme and mistral-vibe failed. uv tried to build hf-xet or cryptography from source ("Failed to build cryptography==50.0.2", "failed to run custom build command for openssl-sys v0.9.117").
   • On windows-11-arm, the Goose script stops ("Windows ARM64 is not currently supported.").
   • On windows-11-arm, Every Code stopped at the start with "Unsupported platform" in coder.js.
   • On windows-11-arm, Codebuff stopped with "❌ Failed to download codebuff: Unsupported platform: win32 arm64" (run 41155667724). In run 41153462586 the driver could not print that line in the code page of the console ("UnicodeEncodeError"). The driver now writes UTF-8.
   • The npm package @jetbrains/junie on Windows (run 41149533184) printed "[Junie] Shim not found at ~.local\bin\junie" also with the real profile.

Mechanism

Open Interpreter has the file layout of Codex CLI (fact 65). Like Codex CLI, it takes its folder from Windows, not from USERPROFILE or HOME. Every Code is a fork of Codex CLI (its npm description says so) and does the same with .code. Junie CLI is a JVM program: the JVM takes the home folder from Windows. Kiro CLI also ignores USERPROFILE. The source of these agents was not read.

A tool that finds the files of these agents on Windows must look in the profile folder of the account. A scenario that must not touch the real profile cannot use these four agents with a throwaway USERPROFILE alone.

Incident

The first runs wrote state of these four agents into the real profile of each runner. The runner is thrown away after the job.

Screens

None. The Linux screens are in the corpus (fact 61).

Not measured

• A variable like CODEX_HOME for Open Interpreter, Every Code, Junie CLI or Kiro CLI (fact 62 has the Codex case).
• Grok CLI on Windows: its README gives a bash installer only.
• What the PowerShell process of Codebuff writes.
• Why %USERPROFILE%\.qoder changed during the runs of other agents.