Your first session

A guided walkthrough that takes you from a fresh install to your first successful recall inside a real coding session, with every command ready to copy. If you have not installed yet, start with Installation, then come back here. For the short version of the install steps, Getting started covers them too.

Related:

• Getting started
• Installation
• Everyday use
• Troubleshooting

#What you will do

By the end of this walkthrough you will have:

1. Confirmed the install is healthy.
2. Saved your first memory by hand.
3. Recalled it.
4. Wired your coding assistants so capture and recall happen on their own.
5. Watched a real session start informed.

Each step is a single command or two. Run them in order.

#Step 1: Confirm the install is healthy

Open a terminal and check that the helper is up and you are signed in:

honeycomb status

You want to see the helper reported as running and your sign-in as connected. If the command is not found, open a fresh terminal and try again. If the helper is down, see Troubleshooting: the helper is not reachable.

If you have not finished sign-in yet, open the dashboard and click First time setup:

honeycomb dashboard

The page shows a short code and opens a tab to approve it. No copying codes out of the terminal. When you approve, the dashboard lights up its connected views.

#Step 2: Save your first memory

Teach Honeycomb one durable fact about your work:

honeycomb remember "we deploy from the release branch, never from main"

remember writes a clean note. This is the kind of thing you would otherwise re-explain to an assistant every morning: a decision, a convention, a gotcha.

#Step 3: Recall it

Now ask for it back in your own words:

honeycomb recall "how do we deploy"

You did not have to match the exact wording of the note. Recall matches both the words you used and, once meaning-search has warmed up, the meaning, so you can find a note even when you would not have guessed its phrasing.

If recall comes back empty, the most common reasons are that you are in a different project folder or that meaning-search has not warmed up yet. See Troubleshooting: recall returns nothing.

#Step 4: Wire your coding assistants

So far you have driven Honeycomb by hand. The real payoff is automatic capture and recall inside the assistants you already use. Wire every assistant Honeycomb detects:

honeycomb setup

This finds each supported assistant on your machine (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Hermes, pi, or OpenClaw) and connects it. It is safe to run again any time, for example after you install a new tool. Confirm the wiring:

honeycomb status

If an assistant you expected is not wired, see Troubleshooting: an assistant is not connecting.

#Step 5: Watch a session start informed

Open one of your wired assistants in the same project and start a new session. Instead of starting blank, it begins with a short briefing of what Honeycomb already knows about this project: your recent decisions and durable conventions, including the deploy note you just saved.

You do not have to ask for this. Honeycomb hands the briefing over at the start of the session. It is deliberately small, just the headlines, so it never clutters the conversation. Your assistant can ask for more detail whenever it needs it.

From here, you mostly stop thinking about Honeycomb. As you work, it captures the useful moments and hands the right notes back next time, in any of your wired tools, on any of your machines.

#Step 6: See what it knows

Browse back to the dashboard any time to see the whole picture:

honeycomb dashboard

You will find your memories, the state of each connected assistant, your team's shared skills, a map of your codebase, and overall health, all on one local page. No database knowledge required.

#You are up and running

That is the full loop: install, save, recall, wire, and let it run. What to read next:

• Everyday use for the day-to-day flow and the optional extras (meaning-search and the self-tidying loop).
• Honeycomb for teams if you want a discovery by one person to reach the whole team.
• Troubleshooting if anything along the way did not behave.