Your first agent session
Run one agent against a real repository and confirm the whole loop works before you scale it up.
Outcome: one agent session that completes a real change in your repository, with a durable task recording it.
Prerequisites
Pick the right first task
Choose something you could do yourself in ten minutes and would recognise as correct immediately. Good candidates:
- Add a test for a function that already exists.
- Rename a symbol consistently across a few files.
- Fix a bug whose cause you already understand.
Poor candidates for a first run: anything open-ended, anything touching build configuration, anything you cannot verify quickly.
TIP
You are testing the loop, not the model. A task you can check in seconds tells you far more about whether Harmony is working than an ambitious one does.
1. Launch the agent
From the orchestration bar, or in the TUI:
/provider
Expected result: a pane running your provider, at its ready prompt, with the working directory set to your repository.
2. Give it the task
State the outcome and the constraint. Agents do better with a boundary than with a broad invitation:
Add a unit test for parseConfig in src/config.ts covering the case where the
file is missing. Do not change parseConfig itself.
3. Watch the approvals
Depending on your permission settings, the agent will ask before doing things that change your machine or repository.
IMPORTANT
Read approval prompts rather than clicking through them. The prompt is the point at which you can still say no cheaply. See permissions and approvals.
4. Verify the work
Check the diff yourself:
git diff
Then run the project's own tests. Do not accept "the agent said it passed" as evidence — run them.
5. Confirm the task is recorded
nala tasks list
Expected result: the task appears with its state. This is the durable record in the daemon, independent of whether the pane is still open.
6. Prove durability
Close the desktop window entirely, then reopen it:
nala desktop
Expected result: the session, its scrollback, and the conversation return.
Common recovery
| Symptom | Likely cause | Where to go |
|---|---|---|
| Agent never responds | Not authenticated | Provider problems |
| Agent edits the wrong files | Working directory is not your repo | Relaunch the workspace from the repo root |
Task does not appear in nala tasks list | Session did not register | Daemon problems |
| Approval prompts never appear | Permission mode is permissive | Review permissions and approvals |