Day to day

Once your server is set up, you rarely type devmachine commands yourself. You ask your coding agent, from whatever you are working on.

Teach your agent once

devmachine skills add

This installs the devmachine skills for Claude Code, Codex and the other agents on your computer. From then on, any new session knows the CLI, in any folder. See agent skills.

Ask from where you work

The CLI always finds your configuration, whatever folder a session was opened in. So from a session in your project you can ask:

• “Publish port 3000 of the acme workspace at app.example.com.”
• “Add Docker to acme and sync.”
• “Why did the last sync fail?”
• “Open a tunnel to port 5432 on acme.”

There is no need to switch folders or open another session.

Open a session in the configuration folder to change devmachine itself

Your configuration is a folder on your computer. Find it with:

$ devmachine config path
/Users/you/.config/devmachine (from default)

Open a coding agent there when the configuration itself is the work:

• Writing or changing a package of your own. Its files live in packages/, and the agent can read, test and commit them.
• A change across many machines or workspaces, or a review of the whole setup.
• Reading the history. With git set up, every change the CLI makes is a commit.
• Your own rules. setup writes an AGENTS.md here the first time it writes a configuration. Edit it: what your agent must know about your setup, which machine is production, what to ask before touching it, notes about your network. Codex, Pi, OpenCode, Antigravity CLI, Kimi Code, Cline and Claude Code (with a recent enough version, or its skills) all read it in a session opened here. An older Claude Code that only reads CLAUDE.md picks it up too, with a one-line CLAUDE.md here containing @AGENTS.md.

In short: to use devmachine, ask from where you are. To change devmachine, open a session in its folder.

What a session on the server can do

Your configuration and the CLI live on your computer, not on the server. A coding agent running inside a workspace can build, test and run your app, but it cannot publish a port or add a package. Ask for those from a session on your computer.