FAQ

Do I have to configure all this by hand?

No, and mostly you should not. Yachiyo ships with the yachiyo-help skill enabled — documentation of its own CLI, config, and setup procedures — plus shell access. So it can administer itself: set up launch-on-login, repair your PATH, create a schedule, curate a model list, write a skill.

Ask in plain language and check what it did. These docs exist for when something breaks, when you want the underlying detail, or when you need it scripted.

Is there a Windows or Linux build?

Yachiyo supports macOS and Windows 11 x64. The Windows NSIS installer is unsigned, so an Unknown publisher warning is expected. Windows 10, Windows on ARM, and Linux are not supported release targets.

Windows v1 does not provide Activity/OCR, launch on login, keep awake, Kagete, Ghostty control, macOS app automation, or the macOS screenshot skill. Those entries are filtered out on Windows instead of being offered as broken tools.

Does Yachiyo support MCP?

No, deliberately. Skills are Markdown files instead: no protocol, no server process, no manifest. If you can write a README you can extend Yachiyo. That is the whole trade — you give up an ecosystem’s worth of prebuilt integrations and get something you can read, edit, and reason about.

Where is my data?

~/.yachiyo, on your machine. Conversations are in a local SQLite database. There is no hosted backend and no account. See Files and paths.

Is there telemetry?

No.

Can I use a local model?

Yes. The Ollama preset points at http://localhost:11434/v1 and needs no key. Any OpenAI-compatible server works the same way. See Providers.

Can I use several providers at once?

Yes, and it is the expected setup. Model choice is per message, not per app — draft with something cheap, escalate the hard question, keep the whole exchange in one thread.

Do I have to pick one model for everything?

No. There is a chat model and a separate tool model for background work like thread titles and memory distillation. Pointing the tool model at something small and fast is the usual setup.

Do my Claude Code / Codex skills work?

Yes. Yachiyo scans ~/.claude/skills, ~/.codex/skills, and ~/.agents/skills alongside its own, in both your home directory and each registered workspace. They are discovered but not auto-enabled — switch them on in Settings → Capabilities → Skills.

Why did my edit to a bundled skill disappear?

~/.yachiyo/skills/core/ is re-extracted on every app launch. Put your own work in ~/.yachiyo/skills/custom/ instead.

Do schedules run when the app is closed?

No. Schedules, channel bots, and yachiyo send all need the app running. On macOS, set up a LaunchAgent if you want it always on. Windows v1 has no launch-on-login option, so start the app manually and leave it running.

Can other people use my assistant through Telegram?

Only if you let them. Users register on first contact as pending and stay blocked until you allow them. Guests get a sandboxed workspace, filtered memory, their own profile, and a token quota. See Channels.

Will the bot reply to everything in a group chat?

No. Group mode runs a cheap probe model that watches the conversation and only wakes the full model when there is something worth saying, backing off through dormant, active, and engaged phases. See group discussion mode.

Can I stop it from editing files?

Yes. Use Explore or Chat run mode, which removes the editing tools from the model’s tool list entirely, or just do not give the thread a workspace. Every run that does touch files leaves a reviewable diff.

Are my API keys safe?

Model-provider API keys and Vertex private keys are encrypted in a device-local vault protected by the operating system. They are not written to config.toml or copied by sync. CLI output redacts API keys.

Other secrets have separate rules: the Exa web-search key can live in config.toml, while channel credentials live in channels.toml. Keep both files private.

What happens when a conversation gets too long?

Older context is compacted rather than dropped — a handoff summary preserves the thread’s substance while freeing the window. The threshold is configurable via chat.stripCompactThresholdTokens.

Can I search old conversations?

Yes, in the app or from the CLI. The full-text index is trigram-based, so it handles CJK as well as English:

yachiyo thread search "that thing about retries" --limit 10

Does sync mean I can chat from any device?

Partly. Settings sync both ways, but chat archives from other devices arrive read-only — you can read a laptop conversation on your desktop, not continue it there.

Can I contribute?

Bug fixes and documentation improvements are welcome. Feature PRs are not accepted unless the feature was discussed and approved in an issue first — open the issue before writing code. See the repository.