Some setup feedback as a newcomer

[einarpersson]

Hi! I'm really exited about getting started with CodeCompanion. It looks really great. 🎉

However, here are some quick experiences as a new user, following the official [getting started]-section. I post it here so that it may be improved for other newcomers (also I'm still struggling a bit as you'll see).

1. When I was struggling with setting up my antrophic adapter/key, I got confused by the fact that Code Companion worked fine at first. What I later realized was that CC was using my Copilot as a default/fallback.

Expectation: I did not think the chat interface would work with no config, I did not expect it to "discover" my copilot (which I assume is what has happened).

Suggestion: Please add a note about this in the getting started section. I mean, it's great that it "just works" but it was not what I anticipated. What can you expect with a bare minimum config? (no adapters configured, no strategies configured).

Note: For me Copilot has so far only been "smart autocomplete" and I didn't even know it could be used like this. I'm probably not the only one being confused as what it means to use "copilot as an adapter".

2. Given 1. I was further confused by the fact that the Chat interface worked out of the box, but the following command did not.

:CodeCompanionChat this is a test, what is 1 + 1?

Error executing Lua callback: ...ompanion.nvim/lua/codecompanion/strategies/chat/init.lua:491: attempt to index field 'opts' (a nil value)
stack traceback:
        ...ompanion.nvim/lua/codecompanion/strategies/chat/init.lua:491: in function <...ompanion.nvim/lua/codecompanion/strategies/chat/init.lua:490>
        vim/shared.lua: in function 'tbl_map'
        ...ompanion.nvim/lua/codecompanion/strategies/chat/init.lua:490: in function 'has_tag'
        ...ompanion.nvim/lua/codecompanion/strategies/chat/init.lua:509: in function 'add_system_prompt'
        ...ompanion.nvim/lua/codecompanion/strategies/chat/init.lua:309: in function 'chat'
        ...m/lazy/codecompanion.nvim/lua/codecompanion/commands.lua:91: in function <...m/lazy/codecompanion.nvim/lua/codecompanion/commands.lua:90>

This was me just following the getting started guide.

Expectation: If the Chat Buffer worked out of the box, i expected the same be true for the command above. (also perhaps more readable errors if this is not a bug?)

This error persists even after setting up my antrophic adapter and configuring it for chat.

return {
	"olimorris/codecompanion.nvim",
	dependencies = {
		"nvim-lua/plenary.nvim",
		"nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter",
	},
	opts = {
		strategies = {
			chat = {
				adapter = "anthropic",
			},
		},
		adapters = {
			anthropic = function()
				return require("codecompanion.adapters").extend("anthropic", {
					env = {
						api_key = "cmd:cat /home/einar/.config/nvim/.claude.key",
					},
				})
			end
		},
	}
}

Thank you! Once again, this looks really promising despite the bumps in the road and I'm very excited to dig deeper.

[olimorris]

Really appreciate your feedback and thanks for sharing. As an open source maintainer, there's a lovely window of discovery that new users to the plugin have and they can only experience once. So these first impressions are joyous for me to understand how you see things.

Your feedback has been implemented in the docs and I've fixed the :CodeCompanionChat bug in v14.7.1 (593f2c5).