Interactive Shell and TUI

Run coven with no arguments when you want Coven to choose the interactive shell for a terminal session.

coven

Run coven chat — or its identical alias coven tui — when you want to be explicit:

coven chat
coven tui

The interactive surface is designed for humans who do not want to memorize subcommands. It starts with setup checks and safe first actions before launching a harness.

When Coven Code is installed

If the coven-code binary is on PATH, interactive coven, coven chat, and coven tui invocations exec into Coven Code, the full coding TUI, instead of the legacy shell. Set COVEN_LEGACY_TUI=1 to opt out and keep the shell described on this page.

Explicit subcommands such as coven run, coven daemon, and coven sessions are never redirected — only the interactive entry point hands off. See Core concepts for the ownership boundary.

Terminal routing

When stdin and stdout are both terminals, coven opens the interactive chat/shell. When you pass a bare prompt, Coven routes the text as a Cast prompt:

coven "summarize the current project"

Use Run if you want to choose a harness explicitly:

coven run codex "summarize the current project"

When to use explicit commands

Use explicit subcommands for automation, support, or docs:

• coven doctor for setup checks.
• coven daemon status for daemon process state.
• coven sessions --plain for copyable tables.
• coven sessions --json for client integration.

The interactive shell is the front door. The daemon and session commands are the operational reference paths.