Engines and accounts

An engine is the agent CLI an agent runs in: Claude Code, Codex or opencode, unchanged. An account is what pays for its model. This page covers installing and signing in each engine, choosing a model, permission levels, and accounts.

Every engine runs in its own terminal in Herdr core, where you can watch it with hc attach and type into it.

wheems setup → Engines shows each engine’s version and whether it’s signed in. Pick one: setup shows the install command and asks before running it, then runs the engine’s own sign-in on your terminal, so you log in yourself. To do it by hand:

opencode’s free models need no sign-in.

Claude Code and Codex ask once whether to trust a new folder, and nobody can answer that from Slack. Open the engine in each new workspace folder once and say yes:

cd ~/wheems/workspaces/acme
claude                 # or: codex --no-daemon

wheems setup offers to do this when it creates a workspace, and wheems init prints the commands. wheems doctor checks it:

Agents
  ! acme folder: Claude Code hasn't been told to trust the workspace folder, so its first session will wait for that answer at the Mac
      Open the engine in that folder once and say yes, or run wheems setup.

opencode doesn’t ask.

Each agent’s front matter names its engine, model and account:

---
engine: codex
model: gpt-6.1-sol
account: chatgpt-subscription
permissions: auto
---

• model is the engine’s own model id, passed to it as is: claude-opus-5-5 for Claude Code, gpt-6.1-sol for Codex, openrouter/x-ai/grok-5 or opencode/big-pickle for opencode.
• wheems init <id> --engine codex --model gpt-6.1-sol sets them when creating a workspace. Without --model, the engine’s default is used.
• Restart the service after changing them.

permissions says how much an agent may do without asking:

A prompt means someone has to answer it at the Mac. In Slack you’d see:

Wheems: The agent is waiting for an answer at the Mac, such as a permission prompt: `hc attach t7`.

So a chief of staff you talk to from your phone usually runs on auto, which is what wheems init writes.

When Wheems starts an agent, it writes the engine’s instructions file in the workspace folder: CLAUDE.md for Claude Code, AGENTS.md for Codex and opencode. It holds, in order:

1. the agent’s own instructions, from its Markdown file;
2. Wheems’s built-in instructions: talking to the person, wheems reply, writing notes, searching the knowledge base and proposing skills;
3. what the agent should know at launch: about-you.md and the workspace’s brief.

Don’t edit this file: it’s rewritten at every launch and ignored by git. Edit the agent’s file in agents/ instead.

Answers are always read from the engine’s own record of the conversation, never from the screen.

Accounts are declared once in install.yaml, and each workspace lists the ones its agents may use:

accounts:
  claude-subscription: { driver: claude }
  chatgpt-subscription: { driver: chatgpt }

accounts: [claude-subscription, chatgpt-subscription]

An agent’s account must be one of its workspace’s accounts, and each workspace’s must exist in install.yaml. wheems validate checks both. wheems init and setup add the right account for the engine you choose:

Today an account is a label: the engine uses whatever it’s signed in with.

Running Claude Code and Codex on your own subscription, for yourself, is what they’re for. Agents draw on the same usage limits as your own sessions, and each workspace keeps up to four sessions running. Check your provider’s terms before running Wheems for other people.

Agents run on their model providers: Anthropic for Claude Code, OpenAI for Codex, whichever provider opencode is set up with. Those providers see each conversation and what agents load or read, including about-you.md and the brief. Search by meaning with Ollama is local.