🧙‍♂️ Mentat ⚡

It is by will alone I set my mind in motion

The Mentat Mantra

The Mentats of Dune combine human creativity with computer-like processing - and now you can too.

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Mentat is the AI tool that assists you with any coding task, right from your command line.

Unlike Copilot, Mentat coordinates edits across multiple locations and files. And unlike ChatGPT, Mentat already has the context of your project - no copy and pasting required!

Want help understanding a new codebase? Need to add a new feature? Refactor existing code? Mentat can do it!

🍿 Example Videos

See the videos on Twitter or YouTube:

• Intro (2 min)
• Explaining and editing Llama2.c (3 min)
• More Mentat features (4 min)

⚙️ Setup

Install

Before installing, it's suggested that you create a virtual environment to install it in:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

Note that you'll have to have activated the virtual environment to run mentat if you install it there.

There are then 3 install methods. The first two will just let you run it:

• PyPI: python -m pip install mentat-ai
• Github: python -m pip install git+https://github.com/biobootloader/mentat.git

The third option is useful if you'd also like to modify Mentat's code, as well as run it:

git clone https://github.com/biobootloader/mentat.git
cd mentat

# install with pip in editable mode:
pip install -e .

Add your OpenAI API Key

You'll need to have API access to GPT-4 to run Mentat. There are a few options to provide Mentat with your OpenAI API key:

1. Create a .env file with the line OPENAI_API_KEY=<your-api-key> in the directory you plan to run mentat in or in ~/.mentat/.env
2. Run export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your key here> prior to running Mentat
3. Place the previous command in your .bashrc or .zshrc to export your key on every terminal startup

Configuration

For custom configuration options see configuration.md

🚀 Usage

Run Mentat with:

mentat <paths to files or directories>

If you provide a directory, Mentat will add all non-hidden text files in that directory to it's context. If this exceeds the GPT-4 token context limit, try running Mentat with just the files you need it to see.