Pick your role
Rousseau's audience splits cleanly along three axes. Pick the one that matches your goal and read in order — every path assumes the previous section has been absorbed.
Individual developer
You want a coding assistant on your own laptop that persists sessions and drives your existing claude CLI. No team, no shared deployment.
| # | Page | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Getting Started | Install, rousseau chat, first-run walkthrough. |
| 2 | Concepts | Understand the agent loop and the session store before you customise anything. |
| 3 | User Guide: CLI | Every command, every flag. |
| 4 | User Guide: TUI | Keybindings and panel semantics. |
| 5 | User Guide: Tools | What the five built-in tools do and don't. |
| 6 | Configuration | Tune the pieces you touched. |
| 7 | Skills | Author reusable prompt fragments. |
Skip everything under Developer Guide unless you plan to embed the agent loop in another binary.
Platform operator
You are running rousseau for a team behind a corporate perimeter. Uptime, auditability, and least-privilege posture are load-bearing.
| # | Page | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Getting Started | Install and smoke-test. |
| 2 | Platform Support | Confirm every dependency version. |
| 3 | Concepts | Layered architecture — what you can trust to stay stable across releases. |
| 4 | Deployment | Rootless Podman + Quadlet. Kubernetes note. |
| 5 | Guides: Kubernetes Deployment | If Kubernetes is your target. |
| 6 | Configuration + Reference: Config Schema | Every knob, structured. |
| 7 | User Guide: Approval Policies | The tool-call approval story you present to auditors. |
| 8 | Guides: Observability | Wire slog output into your log pipeline. |
| 9 | Guides: Audit + Approval Policies | Worked pattern-mode config with deny rules. |
| 10 | Updating | Move between versions safely. |
Security reviewer
You are vetting rousseau before rollout, or answering a supplier-questionnaire on your team's behalf.
| # | Page | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Security | Trust model, supply-chain posture, cryptography inventory. |
| 2 | Installation | cosign + SHA-256 verification recipe. |
| 3 | Concepts | Layered architecture — where the trust boundaries live. |
| 4 | User Guide: Approval Policies | The lever between the model and the shell. |
| 5 | Guides: Read-only Mode | Posture for a first-pass inspection deployment. |
| 6 | Reference: Exit Codes | Failure modes surfaced to init systems and monitors. |
| 7 | Privacy | Data-flow posture. |
| 8 | Deployment | Runtime hardening — Podman flags, capability drops, seccomp. |
Cross-cutting reading
Every reader benefits from these once they have picked a role:
- Troubleshooting — every diagnostic you can reach with
rousseau doctor. - Changelog — what moved between releases.
- MCP — how rousseau exposes tools and sessions to other agents.
- Cron — schedule prompt-on-a-clock.
Next
- Platform Support — what runs where.
- First transport — worked WhatsApp walkthrough.