YoloCoder

A minimal boilerplate for the YoloCoder CLI.

yolocoder "Add expiration support to user sessions"

At startup, YoloCoder prints the current folder it will work in. No Git repository is required: YoloCoder maps and patches the folder directly. If the folder already has its own .git (not an ancestor directory's), it's used opportunistically for a .gitignore-aware map and faster patch checks.

Passing a task runs it once and exits. Running yolocoder with no task starts an interactive session instead: it prompts, works, reports what it did, then prompts again, all in one continuous transcript. Leave with /exit or Ctrl+C.

At the prompt, paste multiline instructions normally, use arrow keys to reposition the cursor, press Enter to send, and press Shift+Enter for a new line (falls back to Enter-only in terminals that don't report Shift+Enter separately).

While it works, YoloCoder prints what it is actually doing — the files it reads, the searches it runs, the plan, the patch, and the test result — so the finished session leaves a readable trail rather than a single status line that overwrites itself.

Debugging

When a provider returns something unexpected, /debug in a session shows every request and reply as they happen. For a full untruncated trace on disk, including each patch and what Git said about it:

YOLOCODER_DEBUG_LOG=1 yolocoder          # ~/.config/yolocoder/debug.log
YOLOCODER_DEBUG_LOG=/tmp/trace.log yolocoder

The trace holds the contents of the files being worked on, so it is written with user-only permissions. It never contains the API key, which travels in a header rather than the request body.

Install

macOS and Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mindsdb/yolocoder/main/install.sh | sh

Windows PowerShell:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mindsdb/yolocoder/main/install.ps1 | iex

Develop

Requires Go 1.24 or newer.

go run ./cmd/yolocoder
go test ./...

Connect an LLM

On first launch, YoloCoder asks you to connect either:

• MindsHub using browser sign-in
• Any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint using a base URL and API key

The endpoint configuration is saved to ~/.config/yolocoder/config.json. The API key is stored separately in ~/.config/yolocoder/credentials.json with user-only permissions.

For a one-off environment-based connection that is not persisted:

OPENAI_BASE_URL=https://api.example.com/v1 \
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-example \
OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-5.2-codex \
yolocoder --llm-from-env-vars "Add expiration support to user sessions"

Use yolocoder config show, yolocoder config connect, or yolocoder config reset to manage the saved provider.

Run yolocoder model to switch models on the saved provider: it lists what the endpoint's /v1/models offers (MindsHub exposes several) and lets you pick one, or pass a name directly with yolocoder model <name>.

How it works

YoloCoder keeps the loop deliberately small:

1. Routes the message: a plain conversational message gets the model's direct reply and stops there; only a coding task continues below.
2. Builds a compact map of the current folder (.gitignore-aware when it already has its own Git repository, a plain walk otherwise).
3. Opens one conversation that reads the files it needs (or searches, when the map isn't enough) and then answers with a summary, the files it touches, and a unified diff. Planning and patching are the same request: the files are already in the conversation from the tool calls, so asking separately would resend all of them to learn nothing new.
4. Applies the diff with git apply, which works directly against the folder without requiring a Git repository. If Git rejects it, the hunks are placed by matching their content instead, since a model reliably gets the content right and the line numbers and counts wrong.
5. Runs the repository's detected test command.
6. Retries at most twice, continuing the same conversation so a repair costs only the failure evidence rather than the whole context again.
7. Falls back to writing whole files when no diff will apply at all.

The model never receives a shell tool. Local code exposes only bounded read_files and search tools during context gathering. Patch application and testing are deterministic local operations.

Release builds check the rolling latest GitHub release whenever the CLI starts. If a newer build is available, YoloCoder verifies its SHA-256 checksum, replaces the current binary, says so, and restarts into it, so the run you just started continues on the new build rather than the one it launched with. Set YOLOCODER_NO_AUTOUPDATE=1 to disable this behavior. Normal startup also prints the embedded version and short commit, for example YoloCoder main (68542b0).

Run yolocoder update to force an immediate check and bypass any saved check interval from an older installation.

Interactive startup uses a small [*_*] robot animation while YoloCoder checks for and installs updates. Non-interactive output remains animation-free.

Version tags matching v* create permanent GitHub releases. Every push to main refreshes the rolling latest release used by the self-updater.