Your first session

One conversation in one terminal. Launch Autolith in your project, say what you want in plain prose, and reach for Lisp or commands when you need exact actions.

Launch and authenticate

$ cd my-project
$ autolith

Sign in once per provider. Subscription providers open a browser authorization; key-based providers take a hidden paste. Authenticate from the shell first, or from the prompt window later with /auth. Device-code flows print the URL, so you can open it on another machine.

$ autolith auth chatgpt

Say what you want

Ordinary text is a prompt. A line that starts with ( is Common Lisp, evaluated in the running image with your privileges, and the model sees both your form and its result. Slash commands are syntactic sugar for the same Lisp calls, so /cwd and (cwd) are the same operation:

❯ you
  Summarize the failing tests and propose the smallest fix.

❯ you
  (help)

❯ you
  (resource.read :uri "workspace:.")

Prompts can also be computed. Send a file as your message, or steer a named child agent directly:

(prompt (read-file "review-notes.org"))
(prompt :to 'test-review "Run focused tests and report only failures.")

Interrupt, correct, continue

Typing while Autolith works queues a steering message that lands at the next safe boundary. Ctrl-C cancels the active turn, and a second Ctrl-C exits. When one of your own forms signals an error, the restart debugger keeps the failed stack alive, can ask Autolith why it failed, and offers up to three validated recoveries.

Leave and come back

$ autolith resume

Conversations persist as append-only files and carry titles, so the resume picker reads like a history instead of a list of hashes. To read a conversation without resuming it, use autolith replay ID. The State page covers both.