Frequently asked questions

pear is a pair programmer for AI-enabled engineers. It runs in your terminal alongside your coding agent, watches your diffs and context, and tells you what matters. The free open-source tier auto-reviews changes and surfaces insights. Pro remembers what you understand, detects knowledge gaps, and teaches you at the moment of execution.

You can — and you'll get a decent answer. But that's an explainer, not a learning system. ChatGPT forgets everything between sessions. It doesn't know what you already understand. It can't detect gaps you don't know you have. It won't proactively teach you when a concept is relevant. pear Pro remembers your learning state, adapts its teaching to your level, and surfaces insights at the right moment — without you having to ask.

Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenCode are AI coding tools — they generate and edit code for you. Pear doesn't write code. It's the layer that makes sure you understand what those tools write. They make you faster; Pear makes you smarter. Use them together.

You run pear in your terminal alongside your editor. It reads context from your coding session (diffs, file tree, recent changes), checks your learning state to understand what you already know, and teaches you only what's new or misunderstood. Over time, it builds a concept graph of your engineering knowledge and adapts explanations accordingly.

BYOK stands for Bring Your Own Key. Instead of routing your requests through our servers, pear sends prompts directly to your LLM provider using your own API key. This means you control your costs, your data stays between you and your provider, and you can use whichever model you prefer.

Yes. Pear is BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) — you provide your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter. This keeps your data private and your costs transparent. Managed mode (no API key needed) is planned for the future.

At launch, pear supports Claude (Anthropic), GPT (OpenAI), and any model available through OpenRouter. Since pear is BYOK, you'll use whichever provider you already have an API key for.

Pear is free and open source. Bring your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter and you get the full experience — watch mode, auto-reviews, interactive Q&A, concept tagging, and more. No subscriptions, no vendor lock-in.

Yes. Pear is open source and free forever. Bring your own API key and you get the full experience — watch mode, auto-reviews, interactive Q&A, concept tagging, and more. No credit card, no time limit, no paywalled features.

With BYOK, your code context is sent directly from your machine to your chosen LLM provider. pear doesn't store your code on our servers. Your API key is stored locally in your config file and never transmitted to us.

pear launches on macOS only. Linux support is planned for v1.6. Windows support is on the roadmap but not yet scheduled — WSL may work but isn't officially supported at launch.

No. pear runs in your terminal independently of your editor. Use VS Code, Neovim, Zed, or whatever you prefer — pear works alongside any editor by reading your project's git state and file structure.

pear installs via go install, Homebrew (brew install MitchTheStonky/pear/pear), or a one-line curl script. Run the installer, add your API key with pear init, and you're ready to go. The whole setup takes under a minute.