Your first session

Run niobe in a repository, ask for a change, and read what comes back.

Open the shell

cd my-project
niobe

Niobe opens on the repository you are standing in. There is nothing to sign in to: the session runs on whatever the claude CLI is signed in as.

If standard output is not a terminal there is nothing to draw into, so a piped or redirected run prints the help instead of failing with an errno.

Ask for something

Type into the composer at the bottom of the session pane and press Enter. Alt+Enter opens a new line instead of sending.

› add etag support to the catalog fetcher

What happens next, on screen:

1. The transcript fills in. Every read, edit and command the backend makes appears in the session pane with what it touched and what it returned.
2. A prompt may stop the turn. In ask mode, a call no rule already allows waits for you: y allows it once, n denies it, a allows every call to that tool from now on, p allows that tool on that target. See Permissions.
3. The right column keeps score. Cost and tokens at the top, running sub-agents in the middle, changed files and the decisions behind them at the bottom.
4. The status line says where you are — the repository, the backend and model, the branch, the tokens so far, and the budget if you set one.

Stop, scroll, leave

• PgUp / PgDn scroll the transcript. Scrolled back, the shell says so, and PgDn returns you to the newest line.
• Shift+Tab cycles how tool calls are gated.
• F10 or Ctrl+Q quits. The terminal is restored on every exit path, including a panic or a SIGTERM.

Nothing is lost on the way out. Every event was written to .niobe/sessions.db as it happened, so the session can be carried on later:

niobe sessions            # what this repository can continue
niobe --resume 3          # carry on with one

Set a ceiling

niobe --budget 2.50

The session stops once it has cost that much, and says so in the transcript before it gets there. On a subscription plan the figure is what the same work would have cost on the provider’s API — see Cost and budgets.

Where the session is kept

Everything goes under the repository root, and nothing leaves the machine:

Both are worth a line in .gitignore unless you mean to share them — and sharing config.toml is a decision Niobe makes you confirm, because a config arrives with a clone. See Trusting a repository’s config.

This page describes v0.4.0.