Badger Quickstart

Badger is the seventh Chimera coding-agent CLI. It mirrors a harness-rewrite posture: tighter step budget, focused tool surface, and rerun-on-failure discipline as a first-class concern. Where mink mirrors a TUI-first ergonomic and ferret mirrors a sandbox-first / IDE-first posture, badger is what you reach for when “better harness tools” is the load-bearing requirement.

Install

uv sync --extra dev --extra anthropic

One-shot prompt

chimera badger -p "Refactor src/util.py to remove duplicated string formatting"

The default model is claude-sonnet-4-6. Override with --model or $BADGER_MODEL.

Interactive REPL

chimera badger

You drop into the shared Chimera REPL with the badger slash palette (see parity-matrix.md for the full list).

Harness-first defaults

Badger ships with deliberately tight defaults:

Knob	Badger	Other CLIs
`--max-steps`	25	50
Tool surface	full set, easily restricted via `--allowed-tools`	full set
Rerun-on-failure	opt-in (`--rerun-on-failure`) with up to 2 reruns	not exposed

The intent: prefer rerun discipline over runaway loops. See harness-discipline.md for the rationale.

Subcommands

chimera badger sessions list           # show persisted runs
chimera badger sessions show <id>      # transcript
chimera badger parity --against PARITY.md   # parity check
chimera badger share <session>         # export tarball

What’s next

Harness Discipline — why max-steps=25 and why rerun-on-failure is opt-in.
Parity — declare a target schema and diff live.
Rerun on Failure — markers, refinements, budgets.
Providers — Anthropic-first chain with sane fallbacks.
Parity Matrix — flag/command surface vs sibling CLIs.
Security and Trademarks — naming hygiene, allowed paths.