skalpel

Skalpel is the local proxy and terminal UI for coding agents — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, and others. It runs as two binaries on your machine: skalpel, a Bubble Tea TUI configurator, and skalpeld, the local daemon that intercepts agent traffic, applies engines, and forwards to upstream providers. The two ship as a single npm package and are always installed together.

Install and first run

After signing up at skalpel.ai:

npx skalpel login

npx skalpel login materializes both binaries and runs a browser-loopback sign-in against Cognito; the daemon writes the Cognito JWT bundle to auth.json and the next skalpel launch lands you on the Engines tab. To install persistently:

npm install -g skalpel

Both skalpel and skalpeld are placed on your PATH. Then run:

skalpel

to open the guided first-run walkthrough (brand banner, step-by-step setup, sign-in handoff, and toggle tips).

Note: npm may hide lifecycle-script output; if you want to see install wizard logs during npm install, use:

npm install -g skalpel --foreground-scripts

For details on what gets installed where, per-OS service registration, updates, and uninstall, see INSTALL.md.

Subcommands

skalpel accepts a small set of subcommands:

• skalpel — launch the Bubble Tea TUI (default).
• skalpel login — browser-loopback sign-in; writes auth.json.
• skalpel logout — revoke the active session (best-effort) and delete auth.json; supports --yes to skip the [y/N] confirm.
• skalpel uninstall — clean up skalpel state on this machine.
• skalpel --version / skalpel --help — utilities.

Links

• Homepage: https://skalpel.ai
• Documentation: see INSTALL.md and SPEC.md in this repo
• Issues: https://github.com/skalpelai/Skalpelai_Client/issues
• License: Apache-2.0 (see LICENSE)