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Quickstart

From an installed elanous to a first change made for you. The first time takes a few steps: open a new shell (or source your shell profile) so elanous is on your PATH, sign in with the ChatGPT device code (open the link it shows and type the code by hand), and answer first-time setup the first time you run elanous — it asks again which model provider to use and asks for your Obsidian vault path. After that, one sentence starts the work. Signing in to GitHub (gh) lets it open pull requests.

1. See what is missing​

elanous doctor

doctor is a report, not a gate: it exits 0 even with nothing configured. For each credential it says whether it resolves, where it came from, what it unlocks, and whether a free fallback exists. Its readiness section names anything that would trip you up next, with one command each; elanous doctor --fix shows the repairs it can make for you, and --fix --yes applies them.

2. Sign in to a model​

The main path is a subscription, not an API key:

elanous login openai-codex                     # ChatGPT device-code sign-in
elanous login status                           # which providers have tokens
# with the default llm.provider=auto, a ChatGPT sign-in is used first

Other choices (xAI Grok, OpenRouter for Kimi / GLM / Qwen, Anthropic, Gemini, a local model) are in providers.

3. Ask for a change​

Go to the project you want changed and say what you want in one sentence:

cd ~/my-project
elanous harness say "add a Usage section to the README with the three commands a new user runs"

What happens:

  1. elanous writes a goal from your sentence,
  2. works on it in a separate git worktree (your working tree is not touched),
  3. runs the project's tests for the files it changed,
  4. reviews its own change and reworks it if the review finds problems,
  5. finishes with a pull request (when the repository has a GitHub remote and gh is signed in) or with a branch you can merge yourself (no remote).

Add --no-auto-merge if you want to merge pull requests yourself. Add --dry-run to see the plan without starting.

Running the harness on a repository other than elanous itself is new and not fully measured yet (see harness › Other repositories) — start with --dry-run, and use --no-auto-merge so you review and merge the pull request yourself.

4. Talk to it directly​

elanous ask "what does src/app.ts do?"   # one question, one answer
elanous agent "why is the build failing?" # one turn with file and shell tools
elanous                                    # the terminal UI

5. Open the web app​

elanous nexus run      # start the daemon; the web app is served with it
elanous nexus show     # prints the web app link (usually http://127.0.0.1:31415/app/)

Or run elanous start — it looks for a model (offering sign-in if it finds none), starts the daemon if needed and opens the web app. Add --tui for the terminal UI instead.

On first open it takes you to model setup. See Web app.

Where to look next​

  • commands — the commands you will actually use
  • configuration — where settings live and how to change them
  • troubleshooting — messages that look like one thing and mean another