DEVONthink 4.4 Tycho* is the fourth feature release for DEVONthink, and it turns your AI assistant into a genuine co-worker. The new AI Library is a repository of roles, prompts, and skills that live right inside your databases: start from the ten built-in, modifiable functions we ship, each with its own settings and a keyword for quick access in the Chat assistant, or build your own by hand or with AI assistance. Skills can call scripts, including AI-scripted ones, and trigger the automations you already rely on: smart rules, batch processing, and all existing scripts for the Script with Input/Output action. Your library syncs across your Macs via iCloud, and you can export roles, prompts, and skills to share with colleagues or the community.
The Chat assistant itself got smarter too. With MCP tools enabled, the chat assistant is not limited to the selected items anymore but has access to all your databases (if not excluded from MCP) and most tools of the stand-alone MCP server. Multi-step conversations like these are also noticeably faster and much cheaper now, thanks to improved prompt caching. And, of course, we’ve updated to the latest models from all major AI providers, so whichever one you prefer, you’re chatting with its newest version.
Markdown takes the second spotlight this release. The WYSIWYG editor supports live-edited tables and MathJax equations, not just images and links, and a new syntax colorizer with custom color themes makes source and rendered output easier on the eyes. If you write in LaTeX (or wish you could) you can now export Markdown documents straight to native LaTeX, or typeset them as PDF via pdflatex, resolving WikiLinks and transclusions and carrying your title, author, and date metadata along the way.
Web clipping got a matching upgrade: a new, local Markdownifier and Readability engine make it faster and more accurate, with better handling of navigation, ads, boilerplate, paywalls, and user forums. And when you just want to read something without the clutter, the new Reader view gives you a clean, distraction-free look at bookmarks, HTML documents, and web archives. Open it from the navigation bar, then capture straight from it via Tools > Capture or by printing.
Finally, encrypted and revision-proof databases now use modern APFS disk images on macOS 26.0 Tahoe and later, replacing the older HFS+ format, and the Help viewer’s chat assistant is free in every edition, so anyone can ask it a question while reading the manual.
* We named this release after one of the Moon’s most prominent craters, Tycho, itself named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601). Working without a telescope, Brahe compiled the most precise astronomical observations of his era — a dataset so exact that his assistant Johannes Kepler later used it to derive the laws of planetary motion. His work is a reminder that rigorous record-keeping is itself a form of discovery, one whose value can outlast the observer who created it.
