Skip to content

Overview

cheaphelp is an AI software-engineer for your GitHub repositories. It installs as a background service on your machine, watches the repos you register, and runs a team of narrow AI agents — powered by cheap OpenRouter models through the opencode terminal harness — to triage issues, plan work, implement it, and open pull requests for human review.

An orchestrator runs on a configurable timer. Each tick it polls every registered repository, classifies each open issue by its pipeline label, and dispatches the right agent role. A daily USD spend cap guards against runaway costs.

How it works

cheaphelp uses a label-driven pipeline to move issues from triage through to a pull request:

. Responder engages issue authors in the comment thread, refines the scope, and finalizes a clean specification (issues.md) or rejects out-of-scope requests. . Planner turns the specification into an ordered manifest of small, executable tasks. . Workers implement one task at a time on an issue branch, verifying their work before committing. . Fixer makes one attempt to repair the working tree when the quality gate fails, before the issue is sent back to the planner. . Reviewer reviews the combined diff and either opens a pull request for human approval or sends the work back for replanning. . Rework watches open PRs for new human review feedback and pushes fixup commits to address it.

If any role gets stuck, the issue is labelled needs-human and left alone until a person responds. The full state machine is documented in the Pipeline page.

Documentation

  • Getting started — requirements, install, quick start, and running modes
  • Pipeline — label-driven state machine, quality gate, and role descriptions
  • Configuration — config.json fields, models, variants, budget knobs, and CLI config commands
  • Workspace — directory layout, .env secrets, state storage, and agent prompt overrides
  • Sandboxing — sandbox settings, opencode permissions, and security limitations
  • Cost tracking — daily budget, warnings, and per-issue cost.json
  • Background service — systemd timer, continuous mode, and lingering
  • Dev guide — testing, source layout, and contributing

For full API documentation see the API reference. The source code is available on GitHub.