# Silk Code Quick Start

Silk Code is an open-source, model-agnostic AI coding platform with a CLI and local web GUI.

## Requirements

- Python 3.10 or newer
- git
- zsh for the alias setup below

## Install or update

This block is safe to rerun.

```bash
if [ -d "$HOME/SilkCode/.git" ]; then
    git -C "$HOME/SilkCode" pull
else
    git clone https://github.com/RupertCloud/SilkCode.git "$HOME/SilkCode"
fi

cd "$HOME/SilkCode"
[ -d .venv ] || python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/python -m pip install -e .
grep -q 'alias silkcode=' ~/.zshrc 2>/dev/null || \
    echo 'alias silkcode="$HOME/SilkCode/.venv/bin/silkcode"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc
silkcode --help
```

## Connect a model

```bash
export DEEPSEEK_API_KEY=sk-your-key
# Or use a local model:
silkcode models pull qwen2.5-coder
```

## Open a project

```bash
cd ~/Projects/my-project
silkcode gui .
# Or use the terminal interface:
silkcode .
```

The path passed to Silk Code is the repository it will work on.