Quickstart

This page gets you from a checkout to the main Cortex surfaces. It does not assume you know the architecture yet.

Prerequisites

Cortex builds through Nix. Use the repository just commands rather than calling Cabal or GHC directly.

just --list

The common development checks are:

just build
just build-pulse
just test
just docs-check

Build The Library

just build

This builds the Cortex Haskell library: Algebra, Wire, Pulse, and Capability.

Build The Pulse Binary

just build-pulse

The cortex-pulse executable is the substrate runtime shell. It starts Pulse with an empty task registry. That is intentional: Cortex does not ship downstream tasks, model providers, or host tools.

Inspect its runtime options:

./result/bin/cortex-pulse --help

nix run .#cortex-pulse -- --help also works and rebuilds the flake output if needed.

Understand The Boundary

For a useful run, a consumer binary must provide:

• a task registry
• a Postgres database
• secret files for runner tokens and service credentials
• task definitions or compiled circuits inserted through the host integration path

The rest of this Usage chapter sketches those pieces in order.

Next Step

If you are trying to author workflows, read Your first Wire workflow.

If you are trying to operate the runtime, read Running Pulse.