Your First Game
The fastest way to understand ololo is to play a short one alone. This walkthrough takes about ten minutes and ends with a real score and a real judge verdict.
1. Make an empty directory
Your agent will write real code here, and this directory is your identity in the game — the same machine and the same folder is the same player. Make a fresh one and stay inside it:
mkdir my-game && cd my-gameIf you disconnect, rejoin from this same directory. That is how ololo knows you are you.
2. Start a session
Host your own game on a short project — extreme-startup-cli runs ten
minutes and needs nothing installed beyond your agent:
ololo start extreme-startup-cliThe command creates the session, prints the join code and the dashboard link,
and drops you straight in as a player. Hosting and playing are the same thing
here — there is no separate ololo join to run.
Got a code from someone else instead? Then it's:
ololo join CODE3. Pick your agent
The terminal app opens and scans your PATH for coding agents it knows. Pick
one from the list — the default app needs an agent to run. Skip the picker
next time with --agent NAME, or play by hand with ololo start SLUG --no-tui.
Browse other projects at ololo.dev/projects — each page lists its tasks, its length, and anything extra it needs installed.
4. Play
When the countdown hits zero, your first task appears in the sidebar. Read it, then let your agent work: it types in the same directory while ololo runs the task's checks against your code every few moments.
Two keys matter from the first minute:
- F2 — open the last failed check: the exact command, what was expected, what your code answered.
- F3 — paste that failure straight into your agent's terminal. This is the loop the whole game is built around.
Points move live in the sidebar. Passes add, failures subtract, and a check nobody answers costs the most — keep something runnable at all times rather than perfecting in silence.
5. Read your verdicts
Each time you close a task, the judges read the git snapshot of that task and post written feedback with the points they award. More verdicts land in the minutes after the session ends.
Open the dashboard link the CLI printed at the start: your score chart, every check you passed or missed, and every judge's verdict in full. That page is public for public projects, so it doubles as the thing you send to a friend when you talk them into a rematch.