Tips and tricks

Verified against the omp release in data/version.txt. Ordered roughly by payoff.

Route by role, not by hope

The single highest-leverage habit. Assign a cheap model to smol (fan-out, titles, mechanical work), a strong one to slow and plan, and stop running everything on the biggest model “to be safe”. Alt+M assigns roles; Ctrl+P cycles; --smol/--slow/--plan override at launch.

/omfg turns annoyance into policy

The agent reaches for a banned API, ignores a convention, does the thing again. Type /omfg right after: omp forges a TTSR rule (time-traveling stream rule) from your complaint. The rule sleeps until a regex matches the live output stream, then aborts mid-token, injects the correction, and retries from that exact point. Zero context cost until it fires, permanent once written. Inspect with omp ttsr.

Plan mode is the first big jump

/plan (or Alt+Shift+P) makes the agent hard read-only and produces an execution spec at local://<slug>-plan.md. The quality bar: a competent implementer who never saw your conversation could execute the file top to bottom with zero design decisions. Read the plan before approving. Trap: the --plan flag sets the plan role’s model; it does not enter plan mode.

ultrathink, one word, one deep turn

A bare ultrathink in your prompt requests maximum reasoning for that turn only. Cheaper than raising defaultThinkingLevel globally; Shift+Tab cycles the level live when you want it for a stretch.

Know your context exits

They are not interchangeable:

/btw and /tan protect your context

/btw asks a side question against the current context without polluting it. /tan spins a full background agent for tangential work. Both exist so your main thread stays on the main thing.

Memory is off until you flip it

memory.backend ships off; nothing persists between sessions. omp config set memory.backend mnemopi gives you a local SQLite bank, project-scoped. Work a normal day, then /memory stats to see what it kept. /memory enqueue forces full retention now.

Read the meter before tuning

omp stats -s          # where the model-minutes went
omp usage             # remaining quota on every authed account
omp bench             # race your models: TTFT, tokens/s

~/.omp/stats.db is plain SQLite (messages, tool_calls, user_messages). One query answers questions like “how many requests does my advisor fire per main turn”. Set advisor.syncBacklog, compaction, and fallback chains from numbers, not vibes.

Edits are anchored, not guessed

The default edit mode (hashline) anchors patches to a content hash of the file minted by the last read. A stale edit is rejected with a diff of what changed, never misapplied. If you see MismatchError, the file moved under the agent; that is the system working.

eval beats bash: python -c

The eval tool runs persistent Python and JS cells with shared state, structured display, and cancellation. It can call back into the agent’s own tools (tool.read(...), agent(...), parallel(...)), which turns “spawn some subagents” into a loop with a budget. Shelling out to python -c loses all of that.

Everything is a path

read pr://1428 for a pull request, read issue://42, read agent://Scout for a subagent’s output, read ssh://prod/var/log/app.log for a remote file, read xd:// to list deferred tools. Stop pasting content into the prompt; point at it.

Queue follow-ups instead of interrupting

Ctrl+Q queues your next message while the agent works; Alt+Up pulls it back. Steering messages interrupt by default (interruptMode: immediate); set wait if you prefer the agent to finish its thought.

Pin secrets down

secrets.enabled: true obfuscates configured secrets and credential-shaped tokens before anything leaves for a provider. /share runs a redactor over session snapshots (share.redactSecrets, on by default), but review for plain confidential data yourself; redaction targets credentials, not client data.

Let long commands background themselves

bash.autoBackground (on by default) moves anything slow into a managed background job instead of blocking the turn. The hub tool then greps its logs, follows them, restarts it, or sends it keystrokes. Dev servers and watchers stop being a reason the agent “hangs”.

Import your history from other tools

omp --from-claude / omp --from-codex import a Claude Code or Codex session with history intact. omp also reads CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, Cursor MDC, .clinerules and Copilot instructions natively. Switching costs nothing.

omp cleanse for the diagnostics pile

Type errors and lint noise accumulated across a repo? omp cleanse fans out weighted parallel subagents to fix project diagnostics. Good Monday-morning command.

omp git when you want hands on the wheel

A fullscreen git UI with split diffs, a staging sidebar, and a commit composer. omp commit writes the message and updates changelogs.