Step 2: Start your first session
6 min read
DevThrottle is open on your machine and the list on the left is empty. This is the step that fills it: you pick a repository, pick a coding agent, name the job, and say what you want done. What you get at the end is a session - one running coding agent, in one repository of yours, working. The card that appears in the list is that session; there is nothing more to it than that.
About ten minutes, and most of them belong to the agent rather than to you. You need DevThrottle installed and open, and one coding agent set up with its command line tool installed - that is all the previous step left you with. If no agent is set up yet, the second step below shows you where to add one.
Click New Session
It is the one coloured button in the toolbar along the top, with a plus sign on it. A window titled New Session opens, already on its New Session tab. The other tabs - Named Sessions, Resume Session, Handovers - are for later, once you have sessions worth coming back to.
Pick the coding agent
The Agent row across the top has one button for each agent you have enabled, in the order your settings list them, with the first one already chosen. An agent you have set up but switched off does not appear here. If the one you want is showing, click it and this step is done.
If the row instead says No agents configured. Add one in Settings > Agents, do exactly that. Which agents this window offers, what they are called, and what order they come in all come from Settings -> Agents, where adding one is a short form that previews the command that entry will launch with - the entry's own command, before anything this window adds to it.
Pick the repository
The search box already has the cursor in it, so just start typing the name. The list underneath comes in two layers: repositories you have opened before, most recently used first, and below them every repository DevThrottle has found under your root folders but you have not opened yet. So even on a first visit the list may already be full - if you gave the setup wizard a folder that holds your code, everything it found there is waiting for you here.
Only when there is nothing at all - nothing used, nothing found - does the window say No repositories yet and offer a Browse for a repository... button. Browse to the folder holding the code you want the agent working in. It joins the list, so next time it is one click.
Choose with a little care. A session lives its whole life in this repository, running the agent you picked. The name you can change whenever you like; for a different repository or a different agent, you start another session.
Glance at the approval checkbox
Under the list sits one checkbox - Run without approval prompts, ticked by default, with the exact command line option it can add shown in brackets after it. Ticked, it adds that option to the launch, but only if the agent's own settings entry has not already settled the permission question its own way. Unticked, it takes nothing away: the launch still runs with whatever that entry carries. An agent that has no such option at all gets the checkbox greyed out, with the label saying so.
For a first session, leave it as it is and read the warning under these steps. The rule worth knowing is that the entry decides first. If the agent's entry in Settings -> Agents has already settled the permission question - either way, whether that is an unattended option or one that makes it ask - the entry keeps its own choice and this box changes nothing. The box only matters for an entry that settles nothing, and there it is the whole decision: ticked, the agent runs unattended; unticked, it follows its own defaults.
Start it
Click Start Session in the bottom right. The button only comes alive once an agent and a repository are both chosen, so if it is grey, one of those is missing. If the agent's command line tool is not actually installed on this machine, nothing half-happens: DevThrottle tells you before it launches anything, names the program it looked for, and says how to fix it.
Name it after the job
The moment the session starts, a small Rename Session box appears over it, already filled in with the repository's folder name and selected ready to be typed over. Type the job and press Enter.
Name it after the job, not the place: fix-login-timeout, rather than the repository's name a second time. The day you have three sessions running in the same repository, cards named after the job are the difference between glancing and guessing. Escape keeps the folder name, and you can rename at any time from the ... button on the card, whose first menu item is Rename.
Say what you want, and how you will know it is done
The new card is now in the list on the left, already selected, and the terminal filling the centre shows the agent starting up. Under that terminal is a box to type in. Type your first instruction there and press Ctrl+Enter to send it.
Make this first instruction small enough to finish in minutes and concrete enough that you can tell by looking whether it is done. A wording fix a user would notice, a log line you have been meaning to add, one test for the function you never trusted - not the refactor. And say the outcome rather than the keystrokes: what should be different when it is finished, where you believe the relevant code lives if you know, and how you will judge it. "Users see the new wording instead of the old one". "The new test covers the empty case".
Watch the first minute, then stop watching
The terminal in the centre is the agent's own, live: you will see it read your files, decide, and start editing. Watch the first minute, because that is what tells you whether it understood the job. Then leave it alone. Hovering over a working agent is the habit this whole product exists to break.
The card carries the state so you do not have to. When the agent stops and wants something from you, the card reads Needs you. An amber chg badge appears alongside it, counting the uncommitted changes in the working tree it is running in. Read it as that working tree's number rather than this agent's: every session running in the same working tree shows the same count, whoever made the changes. No badge means there is nothing to show, which is not the same as proof that nothing changed.
You now have a session doing real work
One agent, in your own code, on a job you chose. Everything else in DevThrottle is built on top of what you just did.
The next step is the one thing nobody explains, and it is the difference between fighting this product and flying it: there are two places you can type on that screen, and that is on purpose. The prompt bar is not the terminal shows you what the prompt bar can do that the terminal cannot.
The facts behind this page live on Agents and models and Repositories and GitHub.