Getting started with Aquin CLI

Aquin is a CLI for mechanistic interpretability and model analysis on your own GPU. You install aquin on a CUDA machine, load a model, and run inspections, simulations, evals, or watch external training runs from the terminal. Each run is tracked locally under ~/.aquin/commands/. Sign up and get a CLI token on aquin.app (login / waitlist). GPU work and result cards stay on your machine.

The CLI is not a hosted GPU service. Your machine runs forward passes locally. After each command, Aquin stores a local record you can list with aquin commands list. Use aquin chat for a multi-turn agent, or invoke any tool directly as a one-shot command.

Tool mode switches automatically when you load a model. Load an LLM (GPT-2, Pythia, Llama, Qwen) and you get inspection, eval, and simulation commands. Load an embedding encoder (GTE, MiniLM, BGE) and you get the embed analysis suite. Beyond catalog slugs, pass a HuggingFace repo id for supported families. See Supported models. No manual mode toggle; aquin help always shows what is available for your loaded model. Use aquin status anytime to see your account, CLI token, and loaded model (device, mode). Generate your CLI token under Profile → Account.

Feature-level tools need a sparse autoencoder pulled locally first (aquin load sae gpt2-small-l8). The sidebar groups every command by category (inspection, SAE inspection, simulation, SAE training, training watch, evals), split by LLM and embedding where applicable. Cross-cutting setup lives under CLI basics.

Workflow

After waitlist/login on aquin.app, open Profile → Account for your CLI token, then paste it with aquin login. Each account has one active token; regenerating revokes the previous one. Teammates on a shared GPU use their own tokens and aquin switch.

First run

quick start

Command history

Every GPU tool writes a local record. List recent runs with aquin commands list, inspect full JSON with aquin commands show <id>, and clear old records with aquin commands clear.

tracked commands

Simulation run management

After aquin simulate, runs are saved locally. Use aquin list simulation to list IDs,aquin replay simulation --run_id … to reopen one, and aquin compare simulation --run_id_a … --run_id_b … to diff two forecasts. Legacy aliases list-runs, load-run, and compare-runs still work.

simulation runs

Shared CLI flags

GPU tools print formatted tables in the terminal by default. Add --check to also write JSON + PNG artifacts in the current directory (for scripting or CI). Use --save <path> when a command supports a custom JSON export, or --dir <path> for capture-activations. The legacy --output flag is no longer accepted.

trace with check artifacts