Walkthrough
A guided tour of Exponent’s key features
This walkthrough will take you through your first interactions with Exponent, showing our core capabilities and how you can use them. It assumes you’ve already completed the Quickstart guide to set up Exponent.
Starting Exponent
If you haven’t already, start Exponent by navigating to your project directory:
Then run:
This opens a new chat session in your browser. You’ll know Exponent is ready when you see the “Connected” status in the center of the screen, indicating that Exponent has established a connection to your local environment.
Running Your First Command
Let’s start with something simple to confirm that Exponent can interact with your system. Ask Exponent to list the files in your current directory:
Exponent will analyze your request and propose running the appropriate command (such as ls -la on Unix systems or dir on Windows). When Exponent suggests a command, you’ll see something like this:
Use the Ctrl/Cmd-Y shortcut shown or click “Confirm” to execute the command. Exponent will run the command locally and display the results directly in the chat.
This ability to execute commands on your behalf is one of Exponent’s key features. You no longer need to switch contexts between a chat interface and your terminal, and Exponent is able to automatically view the results of the command and take action based on them.
Understanding Your Codebase
Now let’s see how Exponent can string together multiple commands. Try asking:
Exponent will search through your project files, read their contents, and provide an analysis of what your project does. It might look through README files, documentation, source code, and other files to gather this information.
At each step, Exponent will show you exactly what it’s doing and why. At this stage, you are in full control of approving or requesting modifications to each step.
This simple example shows Exponent’s ability to:
- Find relevant files in your codebase
- Read and understand their contents
- Synthesize information from multiple sources
Modifying Files
Let’s see how Exponent can help you create and edit files. Try asking:
Exponent will draft and propose creating a new file.
Exponent always shows you exactly what changes it’s going to make before it makes them, so you can review file modifications before approving them.
When you confirm, it will write the file directly to your filesystem; you can run cat poem.md on Unix systems (or type poem.md on Windows) from your terminal, and you’ll see the file contents.
Keep Going
You’ve now seen the core capability of Exponent: combining command execution and file operations into a powerful agentic programming assistant.
The best way to get comfortable with Exponent is to continue experimenting. Try asking Exponent to help with tasks you’re currently working on, tasks you’ve used other tools for, or just do something silly that might make you smile 😃. Improving your skill at using Exponent is a process of trial and error, and the more you use it, the more effective you’ll become.
More Exponent
Features
Explore Exponent’s full capabilities
Exponent Shell
Use Exponent directly in your terminal
Exponent CI
Integrate Exponent into your CI/CD pipeline