Alan

A minimal coding agent in your terminal.

Alan is currently an early prototype. Some features are still being developed, and behavior may change between releases.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Installation
• Providers
• Usage
• Permissions
• Local models
• Configuration and data locations
• Building from source
• Requirements

Features

• First-class OpenRouter support — full model catalog, per-model custom provider pinning (/model-provider), and reasoning effort control (/effort).
• Paste images — drop a screenshot from your clipboard straight into the conversation and ask about it.
• Compact with focus — /summarize-new "focus hint" summarizes the context and restarts with just what matters.
• Steering — queue a message mid-run and the agent picks it up without waiting for the response to finish.
• Plan and review modes — cycle through them with Shift+Tab when you want the agent to think before it acts.
• Local models — point Alan at any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, no API key required.

Skills support is implemented at the agent level but not exposed in the UI yet — coming soon.

Installation

Prebuilt binaries are published through GitHub Releases. The installer detects your operating system and CPU architecture, downloads the matching binary, verifies it, and installs alan into Cargo's binary directory.

macOS and Linux

curl -fsSL https://github.com/Revantark/alan/releases/latest/download/alan-installer.sh | bash

Restart your shell or ensure ~/.cargo/bin is on your PATH, then run:

alan

Windows

Not supported yet.

Updating

Run the same installer command again to install the latest release. To see the installed version:

alan --version

Providers

Alan currently supports:

• OpenRouter
• Google (beta)
• Zai (beta)

Use the /login command to sign in to any of the available providers.

For OpenRouter, you can pin a custom provider for the selected model with /model-provider, followed by the provider name (no quotes):

• /model-provider deepseek
• /model-provider xiaomi/fp8

Usage

Command	Description
/models	Pick a model from the provider catalog
/plan	Toggle plan mode (also Shift+Tab)
/review	Toggle review mode (also Shift+Tab)
/normal	Turn off plan and review mode
/login	Sign in to a provider interactively
/new	Start a fresh session
/summarize-new [focus]	Summarize the context and restart; optionally pass a quoted focus hint, e.g. /summarize-new "just take the XYZ details"
/effort	Set reasoning effort (none, minimal, low, medium, high, xhigh, max)
/fork	Fork the session from a checkpoint
/tool-free	Allow all tool calls without asking
/tool-slip	Approve a command family once, allow its siblings
/tool-strict	Allow only exact commands already approved
/local	Manage local models (add, remove, edit)
/model-provider <name>	Pin a custom provider for the current OpenRouter model
/help	List available commands

Permissions

Alan provides three policies to handle tool call permissions.

• ◌ Free — allow every tool call without asking.
• ⟐ Slip — once a command family (e.g. bun) is approved, siblings run without asking.
• # Strict — only exact previously-approved commands are allowed; approving an edit tool once unlocks all edit tools (file edits only, not commands).

Grants persist per-project at ~/.alan/projects/<slug>/permissions.json (base directory respects ALAN_HOME). The current policy is shown as a glyph in the status line.

Alan starts in strict policy. Switch with:

• /tool-slip
• /tool-free

Local models

Alan supports OpenAI-compatible local models.

/local add

This opens an overlay with fields for Model ID, URL, API, and API Key. Use /local remove and /local edit to manage your local models. No API key or /login is needed for local models.

Configuration and data locations

Alan stores everything under ~/.alan/ by default:

• settings.json — your settings.
• sessions/ — conversation history (append-only JSONL, one file per session).
• logs/ — daily rotating logs.

All of these locations respect the ALAN_HOME environment variable, so you can redirect them if needed. Two other environment variables are useful:

• ALAN_LOG_DIR — override the log directory.
• ALAN_MODEL — override the default model on startup, e.g. ALAN_MODEL=openai/gpt-4o-mini alan.

Building from source

You'll need Rust 1.88 or newer (see Requirements).

git clone https://github.com/Revantark/alan
cd alan
cargo run -p alan

Requirements

• Rust 1.88 or newer (only for building from source)
• An API key for your chosen provider (not needed for local models)