---
title: "Configure by Conversation"
description: "Describe the change in your own words and let the agent write the settings."
---

> Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://colmugx.github.io/cetas/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Configure by Conversation

There is no configuration DSL to learn. A Cetas session has file tools, and the
settings file is a file — so the fastest path to a configuration change you
cannot remember the shape of is to describe it:

```text
Add a provider called my-gateway pointing at https://llm.internal.example/v1,
declare the qwen3-32b model with a 128k context window, and set it as my model.
```

The agent reads the settings, makes the edit, and reports what it
changed. This is the intended path for anything a picker does not cover:
provider entries, model metadata, subagent kinds, workflow budgets.

## Why this works

The configuration is ordinary JSON in one file, and Cetas ships a manual for
configuring itself — so the agent answers setup questions from that manual
rather than from a memorised guess about somebody's settings schema. That is
also why you should not expect it to invent provider-specific keys: it is
supposed to tell you when it does not know the shape.

## Ask for the diff

Configuration mistakes are cheap to review and expensive to debug. Ask for the
change, then ask what changed:

```text
Show me the diff of what you just wrote.
```

Prefer this over accepting a "done" for anything that touches `providers`,
`workflow`, or the selected model.

## Verify with a command

Anything with a command should be confirmed by the command, not by prose. The
command reads the file back through the same code the product uses:

| Change | Verify with |
| --- | --- |
| Provider or credential | `/login <provider>` |
| Models available | `/model` |
| Decision slot | `/decision` |
| Effort | `/effort` |
| Permission posture | `/permission` |

## What the agent still cannot do

Tool permissions are not suspended for configuration. If the session is
`readonly`, the agent cannot write the settings file either — switch posture
first with `/permission workspace_write`, or make the change yourself.

Two more boundaries worth knowing:

- A change that affects the system prompt — instructions, provider identity, the
  skill catalog — lands in the **next** session. The running one keeps the
  prompt it started with.
- The session will not start and the settings look suspect? A malformed settings
  file is never auto-repaired — fix or restore it; see
  [Settings reference](/cetas/en/reference/settings/).

## When to use it, and when not to

Use conversation for: new providers, model metadata, subagent kinds, workflow
budgets, anything one-off or unfamiliar.

Edit the file directly (or copy it between machines) when you are provisioning a
team, reviewing a change, or matching a known-good configuration — and prefer
`/login` over an inline `api_key` so secrets stay in the credential store.

Source: https://colmugx.github.io/cetas/en/configuration/natural-language/index.mdx