Developers

Setup

• Need a terminal (of course)
• If you already have a suitable build environment, try using it
• …otherwise, Install nix
  • Focus on reproducible declarative builds
  • Result should be the same on any machine
  • Drawback is that it needs to recreate build environment on every machine
• Recommend setting up direnv also
• git clone the parent repository
• cd refoliate/aerie
• With direnv:
  • Optional: echo "dotenv" >> ~/.envrc
  • echo "use nix" >> ~/.envrc
  • direnv allow
  • Do not check in .env and .envrc files - ignored anyhow
  • Do not trust externally sourced .envrc files - security risk
  • Can add API keys and other environment variables to either .env or .envrc
  • Better to put them in .env to avoid reauthorizing after each edit
• without direnv:
  • Need to run nix-shell (no arguments) each time work with repo
  • Set environment variables manually or account-wide

Build/Run

• cargo run -- --session issue-####
• Enable logging: RUST_LOG=aerie=debug RUST_BACKTRACE=full cargo ...
• Headless workflow run:

  cargo run --bin simple-runner -- \
    --temperature 0.3 \
    --model ollama/qwen3-coder:30b \
    --config <path-to-config> \
    tutorial/workflows/toolhead.yml
  

Customization

• Can add custom nodes by using this crate as a library
• Build and run an App in your binary
• Configurable hooks provide some degree of customization
• See the hello-node example project

Custom Nodes

• Custom nodes must implement three traits: DynNode, UiNode and FlexNode
• DynNode determines behavior of the node under the graph runner
• UiNode allows for interactive editing of the node beyond connecting its pins
• FlexNode is marker trait that registers the node for deserialization
  • Must include the #[typetag::serde] attribute