Skip to main content

Quickstart

From an installed elanous to a first change made for you — three commands if you already have a ChatGPT subscription and are signed in to GitHub.

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.

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

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