Getting started

Helmora has three moving parts you touch: a bridge on the machine where your code lives, an agent the bridge drives, and the app you drive it from. Setting up is three steps, in that order.

1. Pair your machine

Sign in to the app, then open Settings → Devices → Pair a bridge. The app mints a six-digit pairing code and shows a one-line installer command with that code already baked in — a curl … | sh line on macOS and Linux, an iex (irm …) line on Windows.

Run it on the machine you want to control. The installer downloads the bridge, registers it to start on login, claims the pairing code against your account, and connects. When it finishes, the machine shows up as a device in the app.

Codes are single-use and live for ten minutes. If yours expires, go back to the same screen and generate a fresh one — the URL changes with it. Details, including what the installer actually registers on each platform, are in Pair a bridge.

2. Connect an agent

A paired bridge is not yet an agent. Use Add agent beside the device in the sidebar (or the onboarding screen, if this is your first one).

The bridge looks at its own machine for supported CLIs — claude, codex, copilot, opencode, goose — and reports which are installed and whether they’re signed in. Detection is strictly local: it inspects executables on that host’s PATH and nothing else. It does not scan your network or read another machine’s configuration.

Pick the adapter, name the registration, and choose a project folder where it applies. Claude Code always needs a folder, because its session store is folder-scoped; Codex, Copilot, OpenCode, and Goose register per machine and pin folders as facets of that one agent. A Test step then runs the real preflight on that bridge and tells you plainly whether the CLI is missing, unauthenticated, or ready.

Agent credentials stay where the provider put them. Helmora does not copy a provider login into the browser or onto another machine — see the per-runtime pages under Runtimes for what each adapter supports.

3. Continue from anywhere

Open a session and prompt it. The transcript streams live: assistant text, tool calls with their arguments and output, diffs, plans, usage, and any approval or question the agent raises. You answer approvals and questions from the app, and the answer goes back into the running turn.

The same session is reachable from a browser and from your phone, and the same session is reachable from the terminal — sessions you started directly in a supported CLI show up in Helmora for the adapters that mirror external work, so you can start on your desktop and keep going on the train.

If both the app and the bridge are on the same machine, that traffic never leaves it. If they aren’t, it goes through the managed relay as an encrypted envelope. Both paths are described in Architecture and Security.

When something looks wrong

Start at Troubleshooting — bridge offline, agent showing signed out, and expired pairing codes cover most first-day problems.