Your First 5 Minutes

Install Arnold, scaffold docs for your project, build some code, and check for drift. The whole loop in under 5 minutes.

Step 1: Initialize your project

Tell Arnold what you're building:

arnold · terminal

> /arnold:init

🦕 What are you building? Scaffolding docs/ ... 📁 docs/ ├── 📁 auth/ │ ├── auth-overview.md │ └── auth-criteria.md ├── 📁 booking/ │ ├── booking-overview.md │ └── booking-criteria.md └── specification.md ✓ 2 features scaffolded, 5 doc files created

Arnold asks what you're building conversationally, then creates structured docs organized by feature.

Step 2: Build some code

Use whatever coding agent you prefer - Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or just write code yourself. Arnold doesn't care how the code gets written.

Or use /arnold:build to let Arnold guide construction from your docs. It reads acceptance criteria and verifies each one with code citations.

Step 3: Check for drift

After writing code, run the signature command:

arnold · terminal

> /arnold:check

🦕 ARNOLD CHECK REPORT ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Scanned: 2 feature docs, 12 source files 🔴 DRIFT DETECTED ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 1. auth: Session timeout 📄 Docs say: "Sessions expire after 24 hours" 💻 Code has: SESSION_TTL = 72 * 60 * 60 → Docs say 24hr, code says 72hr. 🟢 ALIGNED ━━━━━━━━━━ ✓ auth: Rate limit is 5 attempts per minute Run /arnold:resolve to fix drift items.

Step 4: Fix drift

Walk through each mismatch:

arnold · terminal

> /arnold:resolve

🦕 ARNOLD RESOLVE ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Drift item 1 of 1: Auth: Session timeout 📄 Docs say: "Sessions expire after 24 hours" 💻 Code has: SESSION_TTL = 72 * 60 * 60 What should we do? (a) Update docs to match code → "72 hours" (b) Update code to match docs → SESSION_TTL = 86400 (c) Skip for now (d) Flag for team discussion

You choose. Arnold doesn't make assumptions - it shows you the gap and lets you decide.

That's the loop

Write docs → Build code → Check for drift → Resolve → Repeat.

From here, explore: