THE CHELUS GUIDE

Keep the useful parts.

Memory saves facts. Skills save procedures. Both live on your device, where you can inspect and manage them.

Remember facts across conversations

Tell Chelus something worth keeping: your preferred project folder, a working preference, or useful context. It can save owner-only facts directly and tells you what it saved. Proposed changes from background review wait for approval.

sh

chelus memory
chelus memory forget user 2

Use /memory in Telegram to inspect the same owner memory. The forget command above removes the specified entry; inspect the list first so you choose the right one.

Memory is deliberately small. It isn’t a limitless archive: people, projects, places and lists belong in notes. Where SQLite FTS5 is available, Chelus can also search past conversations for relevant context.

Turn a workflow into a skill

A skill is a readable SKILL.md procedure, optionally with reference files or scripts. Teach a repeatable workflow through instructions, files, or a recent conversation:

chat

/learn how we prepare a release checklist

Skill writes require approval by default. Background review may propose improvements after a conversation; they remain pending until you approve them.

The repository ships a few starter skills in skills/: recovering from blocked pages, citing sources, searching arXiv, and systematic debugging. They aren’t installed automatically, so a skill you’ve edited is never overwritten. Copy the ones you want:

sh

cp -r ~/chelus/skills/arxiv ~/.local/share/chelus/skills/

Inspect, approve, and undo

sh

chelus skills
chelus skills pending
chelus skills view NAME
chelus skills history NAME
chelus skills undo NAME
chelus skills pin NAME

Replace NAME with a listed skill. undo restores its previous revision. Pinning keeps a skill out of automatic curation. The weekly curator archives unused review-created skills, not skills you created or pinned.

Keep control of what carries forward

Owner and guest conversations don’t share history. Guests cannot reach owner memory, notes or skills. All three can become part of the context sent to the model provider, so keep secrets out of them.

For implementation details, read the source notes on memory and skills.