Getting Started

Architecture

Pawan Architecture

Install

git clone https://github.com/dirmacs/pawan && cd pawan
cargo install --path crates/pawan-cli

Setup

Set your NVIDIA NIM API key (free tier available at build.nvidia.com):

export NVIDIA_API_KEY=nvapi-...

Or create a .env file in your project:

NVIDIA_API_KEY=nvapi-...

Verify your setup:

pawan doctor

Initialize a project

cd your-project
pawan init

This creates:

pawan.toml — configuration file
PAWAN.md — project context (pawan reads this to understand your codebase)
.pawan/ — local pawan directory

First run

# Interactive TUI
pawan

# Or try a quick task
pawan explain src/main.rs

Configuration

Priority: CLI flags > environment variables > pawan.toml > defaults

Environment variables

Variable	Description
`PAWAN_MODEL`	Model override (e.g., `qwen/qwen3.5-397b-a17b`)
`PAWAN_PROVIDER`	Provider: `nvidia`, `ollama`, `openai`
`PAWAN_TEMPERATURE`	Temperature (0.0-2.0)
`PAWAN_MAX_TOKENS`	Max output tokens
`PAWAN_MAX_ITERATIONS`	Max tool-calling iterations

pawan.toml

provider = "nvidia"
model = "mistralai/devstral-2-123b-instruct-2512"
temperature = 1.0
max_tokens = 8192
max_tool_iterations = 15

[mcp.daedra]
command = "daedra"
args = ["serve", "--transport", "stdio", "--quiet"]

Common workflows

Fix a broken build

pawan heal

AI-powered commit

# Stage all, generate message, confirm, commit
pawan commit -a

# Just preview the message
pawan commit --dry-run

# Skip confirmation
pawan commit -a -y

Code review

# Review all changes
pawan review

# Review only staged changes
pawan review --staged

Continuous healing

# Check every 10 seconds, auto-commit fixes
pawan watch --interval 10 --commit

Headless scripting

# Single prompt
pawan run "add error handling to the config parser"

# From file
pawan run -f task.md --timeout 300 --output json