Quickstart

Intent is currently available to design partners. Once you have access, you can initialize Intent in your project and start capturing decisions in minutes.

Get Access

Intent is in early access. To get started:

1. Become a design partner — Schedule a call and we'll get you set up
2. Receive your credentials — We'll provide installation instructions and access tokens
3. Install the CLI — Follow the personalized setup we send you

Already a design partner? Continue below.

Install the CLI

After receiving access, install the Intent CLI using the instructions provided to you:

# Installation command provided in your onboarding
intent version  # Verify installation

Initialize a Project

Navigate to your project directory and initialize Intent:

cd your-project
intent init

This creates the .intent/ directory and starts the background daemon. The daemon runs automatically and watches for file changes and AI sessions.

What intent init Creates

.intent/
├── config.json          # Project configuration
├── episodes.db          # Episode metadata
├── active-episode       # Current episode name
├── episodes/
│   └── main/            # Default episode
│       ├── db/
│       │   └── journal.db   # Event log 
│       └── crdt-storage/    # Version history per file
├── service.log          # Daemon logs
├── service.pid          # Process ID
└── service.sock         # Unix socket for CLI communication

Configure Your LLM

Intent uses an LLM for decision enrichment—generating summaries of intent, approach, and impact for each exchange. Configure your Anthropic API key:

intent configure llm

This enables automatic enrichment of captured sessions.

Verify It's Working

Check the daemon status:

intent status

You should see:

• Daemon: running
• Episode: main (active)
• Watcher: monitoring files

Start Using AI Tools

Now work with your AI coding tools as normal. Intent automatically captures sessions from:

• Claude Code
• Cursor CLI
• Codex CLI
• Gemini CLI

As you work, Intent:

1. Monitors file changes in real-time
2. Extracts file operations from AI sessions
3. Correlates changes to the exchanges that created them
4. Generates decision enrichments with augmented summaries

Explore Your History

After a coding session, launch the Intent TUI to explore what was captured:

intent -i

The TUI provides a visual interface to browse your decision history, view session timelines, and explore the reasoning behind your code changes.

What's Next