August 2026 in Base UI (Angular): hover-card, combobox, chat, and a zero-dependency CLI

August 2026 added hover-card, menubar, combobox, chat, and more to Base UI (Angular) — base-ui.net. Each component is copied into your repo with npx base-ui-cli add, not installed as a runtime UI package. The CLI itself now ships as a zero-dependency tarball. This post is the monthly highlight; the live feed is /changelog.

Colorlib’s March 2026 survey of 16 Angular UI libraries notes that “The Angular team released Angular 22 in 2026 with standalone components as default, signals, and improved hydration” (Colorlib). That is the stack this library targets: standalone components, signals, and zoneless change detection. The shadcn/ui docs put the distribution model in one sentence: “This is not a component library. It is how you build your component library.” August’s work is more of that model, on Angular 22.

What actually merged

The public changelog is generated from conventional commits that touch the library, CLI, MCP server, or Pro registry — demo-site and tooling commits are omitted. August’s feature line, in the order it landed:

The catalog is 208 items (119 free / 89 Pro). Those August primitives are free unless noted in the registry. Demos: hover-card, menubar, combobox, chat, cookie-banner.

Why the CLI change matters

base-ui-cli is the only runtime you add. It copies .ts / .html / .spec.ts into src/app/components/<name>/ by default and records versions in base-ui-lock.json. August closed two install-path bugs that coding agents actually hit:

1. Verify before write. Registry payloads are checked before they land on disk, so a truncated or swapped file does not become “your” component.
2. Zero-dependency tarball. The published bin no longer shells out, and fetch stays out of the bin entry — the install is npx base-ui-cli add, not a tree of CLI transitive packages.

Agents can skip the CLI UI entirely: npx -y base-ui-ng-mcp lists, searches, and adds the free tier. That is the same copy-in path humans use.

npx base-ui-cli init --yes
npx base-ui-cli add hover-card menubar combobox chat cookie-banner --yes
npx base-ui-cli diff hover-card

diff shows upstream edits per file; update merges them, auto-updating untouched files and skipping (or --force updating) files you changed.

Angular 22, without a rewrite

The library was already signal inputs, output(), standalone, and OnPush. The August chore is the framework bump: Angular 22.1, documented on the catalog. If you started from the StackBlitz or Motif templates, you are on that line. If you vendored components last month, npx base-ui-cli diff is how you see what moved — including overlay positioning shared across popovers, and zoneless template state that was still a plain field in a few places.

We do not claim a performance number for the bump. The Angular zoneless guide is the contract: state written outside a template event has to be a signal, or the view goes stale.

How to follow along

• On the site: /changelog — newest first, grouped by month. Subscribe to the changelog RSS or the blog RSS.
• In git: CHANGELOG.md on the public hub.
• In the project: npx base-ui-cli update against base-ui-lock.json.

Lifetime Pro updates land on the same feed. This monthly article is the narrative; the RSS and changelog page are the source of truth when a date matters.