Crush

Crush is Charm’s terminal coding agent. It supports many model providers and reads API keys from the environment. Use varlock to inject those keys at runtime so they never sit in a plain text .env or shell history.

For install, schema setup, and shared patterns, see the AI Tools overview.

Launch command: crush

Environment variables (from the Crush README):

• ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY, OPENROUTER_API_KEY, GEMINI_API_KEY, and many other provider keys
• HYPER_API_KEY for Charm Hyper (Crush’s built-in provider)

You can also paste a key in the TUI model picker (ctrl+l). Prefer env injection so the key is not typed into the UI or stored in project config.

In a project

Add to .env.schema:

# @sensitive @required
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=op(op://api-local/anthropic/api-key)

# @sensitive
OPENAI_API_KEY=op(op://api-local/openai/api-key)

# @sensitive
OPENROUTER_API_KEY=op(op://api-local/openrouter/api-key)

Tip

You can use any secrets provider you want, but we like 1Password since it uses biometric authentication for local access. All the examples in this guide use the 1Password plugin (op()) to show more real world examples. See that page for plugin setup and auth options.

varlock run -- crush

From any directory

Personal schema at ~/.env.crush:

~/.env.crush

# @sensitive @required
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=op(op://api-local/anthropic/api-key)

# @sensitive
OPENAI_API_KEY=op(op://api-local/openai/api-key)

varlock run -p ~/.env.crush -- crush

Shell alias (optional)

alias vcrush='varlock run -p ~/.env.crush --no-redact-stdout -- crush'

--no-redact-stdout keeps Crush’s own terminal output unredacted while secrets stay out of your shell history.

Tip

Treat project crush.json as trusted code. Review it before running Crush in a directory you did not author.