❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Copilot is an autocomplete tool inside your IDE. HelseCLI is a terminal-based autonomous assistant. Copilot is great for writing lines of code; HelseCLI is great for building whole features, running tests, conducting research, and generating long-form documents.

General

What is the difference between HelseCLI and GitHub Copilot?

Copilot is an autocomplete tool inside your IDE. HelseCLI is a terminal-based autonomous assistant. Copilot is great for writing lines of code; HelseCLI is great for building whole features, running tests, conducting research, and generating long-form documents.

Does HelseCLI train on my code?

No. HelseCLI acts as a bridge to LLM providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google). Your code is only sent to the provider as context for your current request. We do not store or train on your data. Check your LLM provider's data privacy policies for more details.

Is HelseCLI free?

The HelseCLI software is open source and free. However, you are responsible for the API costs of the LLM providers (OpenAI, etc.). Local models via Ollama are completely free to run.

Usage

Why does the AI keep failing at Step X?

This usually happens if the AI lacks context or if the objective is too broad. Try:

  1. Providing an AGENTS.md with more project details.
  2. Breaking the task into smaller steps.
  3. Enabling !plan mode to see where the logic is failing.

How do I stop a runaway Agent?

Press Ctrl + C once to interrupt. If the process is completely stuck, Ctrl + C three times will force-quit HelseCLI.

Can HelseCLI edit non-Python files?

Yes. It can edit HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, YAML, Markdown, and any other text-based format.

Troubleshooting

I'm getting "API Key Not Found" but it's in my .env.

Ensure your .env file is in the root directory where you are launching helsecli.py. Check for typos in the variable names (e.g., OPENAI_API_KEY, not OPEN_AI_KEY).

The Docker sandbox is too slow.

The first run is always slow because it pulls the image. To speed up subsequent runs, ensure you aren't rebuilding the image every time. Check your HELSE_SANDBOX_REBUILD setting.

The document generation failed halfway.

Document Mode is designed to be resilient. You can usually find the partially generated segments in the .cache/docs/ folder. You can ask HelseCLI to resume by providing the same objective.

💡 Have more questions?

Visit our GitHub Discussions to chat with the community.