First Run
The first time you start Arble it makes three decisions with you: which model to use, what it is allowed to touch, and where to keep state. Worth doing deliberately rather than clicking through.
Choosing a model
Arble does not ship a model. It asks you to point it at one — a local runtime such as Ollama or vLLM, or a hosted provider. Local means nothing leaves the machine; hosted means prompts and completions do.
You can change this later, and route different task classes to different models. See Models in the self-hosting guide.
The first permission prompts
The first run that needs to read a file, reach the network or run a command will stop and ask. This is the permission gate, and it is the single most important thing to understand early.
Grant narrowly. filesystem.read scoped to one project directory is almost always the
right first answer; granting it unscoped is almost always the wrong one.
Where state lives
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
| ~/.arble/config.toml | Profiles and global defaults. No credentials. |
| ~/.arble/data | Sessions, runs, memory index. |
| OS keychain | Every credential and token. Never a file. |
A good first run
Ask for something read-only and verifiable, so you can watch the loop without risk:
arble run "List the files in this directory and tell me what this project does"You should see it plan, request filesystem.read, wait for you, then answer. That
sequence — plan, ask, act — is the whole product in miniature.