CharmsLearn how magus charms replace one-off tool flags with shared, composable intent modifiers that patch a target's argument vector at run time. Friction that carries meaningKeep resistance where the resistance is the information; friction that tells every caller the same sentence is a toll, and a toll is removed. Getting startedA linear, CLI-first walkthrough from installing magus to running your first spell-composed target and a ci pipeline. Human-first is the AI integrationNothing is designed for an agent first; an interface legible to a person is legible to anything. MGS9004: no auth token configuredA command asked for the operator (cli) token but none exists yet. The server mints one on its next start, or you can generate it explicitly. No news is good newsA passing run says almost nothing; output is spent on what failed, what changed and what to do next, because every line costs a reader's attention and an agent's context. One source, every doorA capability lives once, in the layer every caller reaches; the CLI, a magusfile, a script and the MCP tools are doors onto it, never copies of it. Quick startEverything you need to be productive with magus on one page (install, first target, the output flags, the agent skills and the guard hook), each linking to the page that goes deeper. TargetsA Target is the addressable unit of work in magus, keyed by project Path and operation Name, with charms layered on top for execution modifiers. The CLI in practiceThe magus subcommands you reach for most, grouped by the question you are asking, with the quirks that are not obvious from the help text. Unix survives at the verb, not the binaryEach verb answers one question, deterministically, from declared sources, and stops; the binary is as big as the monorepo problem. magus affectedRun a target for every project affected by a VCS diff, with forensic modes for explain, graph, CI shard plan, and regression bisect. magus agentRender agent skills, adapt a user-owned harness, or review recurring guard feedback; it never writes the AGENTS.md you own. magus brokerCheck or stop the broker: the per-user process that holds this host's concurrency slots, declared memory and shared services, which a run starts on its own. magus buzzRun Buzz from a REPL, a file, stdin, or an inline snippet, with the Buzz stdlib, every magus host module, and the magus namespace available. magus cleanDelete the files each selected project declares as Outputs, optionally dropping the matching cache entries so the next run rebuilds from scratch. magus commandStandalone build orchestrator and content-addressed cache for polyglot monorepos, with workspace-aware subcommands for build, test, lint, and inspect. magus completionPrint a bash, zsh, fish, or PowerShell completion script to stdout, ready to append to your shell startup file for tab-completion of magus commands. magus configInspect the effective merged configuration or write keys to the local or global magus.yaml, with subcommands for view, set, history, cache, and mcp. magus describeDefine a magus concept (spell, charm, target, project, workspace, module, mcp-tool, tool, file, graph, harness) and list every entity of that kind, or detail one when a name is given. magus diffReport every uncommitted change annotated with what the workspace knows: whether it is generated, how widely its changed symbols are referenced, whether its symbols are public API, and what coverage was observed. magus doctorRun diagnostic checks on the workspace covering project discovery, magusfile syntax, graph cycles, symlinks, env vars, and VCS reachability. magus eventsStream magus events as JSONL, one event per line, so an editor plugin, a status bar, or any other integration can react to runs and results. magus explainShow a single knowledge-graph node in context: its data, its incoming and outgoing edges with provenance, and how many nodes reach it. magus graphEmit the project dependency DAG, export the knowledge graph for external graph tools, and report the graph's shape (god nodes, orphans, doc coverage). magus initBootstrap a magus workspace with a magus.yaml config, magusfile stub, and VCS merge driver; supports global, local, and non-interactive modes. magus jobThe POSIX child lifecycle over delegated work: fork declares a job, exec takes the lease on it in this checkout, exit returns it with its result, wait verifies that result, and run submits one of the server's own jobs. magus lsList every discovered project in the workspace with its language pack, source files, outputs, dependencies, and tool requirements. magus manWrite magus section 1 man pages from the running binary to a user-selected manpath. magus mcpServe the MCP tools over stdin and stdout for the agent host that launched the process, against the workspace it was launched in, with no server and no token. magus notesRead the workspace's human-authored notes: prose a person wrote about the code, anchored to graph entities but derived from none of them. magus pathFind the shortest chain of edges connecting two knowledge-graph nodes, walking edges in either direction, with each hop's relation named. magus queryResolve search terms to knowledge-graph nodes and return the ranked matches plus their neighborhood; also retrieves a target's captured output by ref and a run's journal by invocation id. magus queueList the changes carrying merge intent, plan them into partitions of independent changes, validate speculative candidates, and merge the green ones through the provider. magus refsList a symbol's definition and every file that references it as file:line rows, read from the declared SCIP index rather than found by text search. magus runRun a named target (build, test, lint, format, ci, etc.) for the selected projects, defaulting to the cwd project when no arguments are given. magus selfManage the magus binary in place, with a self-update subcommand supporting version pinning, dry-run, downgrade, and out-of-tree install directories, plus the mgs shorthand. magus serverStart, stop, reload or check the magus server a person starts: MCP over HTTP, the console, the APIs, background jobs and the warm graph and symbol watch. magus sessionOne family over the repository's session store: list what magus invocations ran and the host session each ran in, list the blocks agents raised, close one by hand, and take the host-hook ingest that writes it all. magus shellRead one shell command, or one path an edit is about to write, and report what this workspace would rather you ran. magus spellPack a spell directory's tracked files as an OCI artifact with provenance annotations. Push it under one or more tags, pull and verify a published spell, list its tags, and check or rewrite the magus.lock pins of remote spells. magus statusShow effective config plus the live concurrency pool state of any running parent magus process, with optional --watch polling and --compact output. magus vcsList the dirty paths a commit of this change wants, read against the workspace's declarations, and settle an in-progress merge's conflicted generated files by regenerating them once. magus versionPrint the magus version string, git commit hash, and build date for the currently installed binary, plus the version reported by the server serving this workspace. magus watchWatch the workspace for file-system changes and emit batches of changed paths to stdout, compatible with git diff and magus affected --stdin. magus whereFuzzy-match a project by leaf-anchored substring and print its absolute path, designed for shell substitution like cd "$(magus where api)". magus xReproduces the invocation an output ref recorded, or opens a TTY picker for project and target when given filters instead.