quickstart.md

Badger Quickstart

Badger is the seventh Chimera coding-agent CLI. It mirrors a harness-rewrite posture: tighter step budget, focused tool surface, and rerun-on-failure discipline as a first-class concern. Where mink mirrors a TUI-first ergonomic and ferret mirrors a sandbox-first / IDE-first posture, badger is what you reach for when "better harness tools" is the load-bearing requirement. Run chimera badger --help-long to see verbose per-flag descriptions; --help itself stays under 50 lines for scannability.

Install

uv sync --extra dev --extra anthropic

One-shot prompt

chimera badger -p "Refactor src/util.py to remove duplicated string formatting"

The default model is claude-sonnet-4-6. Override with --model or $BADGER_MODEL.

Interactive REPL

chimera badger

You drop into the shared Chimera REPL with the badger slash palette (see parity-matrix.md for the full list).

Harness-first defaults

Badger ships with deliberately tight defaults:

Knob	Badger	Other CLIs
--max-steps	25	50
Tool surface	full set, easily restricted via --allowed-tools	full set
Rerun-on-failure	opt-in (--rerun-on-failure) with up to 2 reruns	not exposed

The intent: prefer rerun discipline over runaway loops. See harness-discipline.md for the rationale.

Permission mode (5-mode standard)

Badger exposes the cross-CLI --permission-mode flag (shared with chimera ferret and chimera mink). Pick a stance that matches the risk envelope of the run; the same five values work identically across all three CLIs.

Mode	Reads	Edits	Bash / Git	Notes
read-only	allow	deny	deny	Pure planning / review.
suggest	allow	ask	ask	"Show your work" — the default.
auto	allow	allow	ask	Fast iteration; pair with a sandbox.
yolo	allow	allow	allow	Use only inside a sandbox.
strict	ask	ask	ask	Confirm every single tool call.

chimera badger -p "Touch nothing, just summarise" --permission-mode read-only
chimera badger -p "Refactor util.py" --permission-mode auto

The default is suggest. Mappings to the underlying PermissionPolicy presets live in chimera.permissions.modes.policy_for_mode.

Subcommands

chimera badger sessions list           # show persisted runs
chimera badger sessions show <id>      # transcript
chimera badger parity --against PARITY.md   # parity check
chimera badger share <session>         # export tarball

What's next

• Harness Discipline — why max-steps=25 and why rerun-on-failure is opt-in.
• Parity — declare a target schema and diff live.
• Rerun on Failure — markers, refinements, budgets.
• Providers — Anthropic-first chain with sane fallbacks.
• Parity Matrix — flag/command surface vs sibling CLIs.
• Security and Trademarks — naming hygiene, allowed paths.