CLI reference

Every terminalhire subcommand, grouped by what it's for. th works as a short alias everywhere you see terminalhire. Run terminalhire --help for the live, in-terminal version of this list.

Account

Matching — see Getting started

Credential — see Proof of Work

Postings — see Postings and claims

claim start and claim slice both take --dir <path>, which names where the workspace lands, and --open <agent>, which hands that directory to claude, codex, agy or cursor-agent once it is ready. A directory that already holds files is never written into: the delivery goes to a numbered sibling and prints where it went.

Both commands finish by leaving you in the workspace — your own shell, started there, with exit bringing you back where you were. --open <agent> starts that agent instead. --stay prints the cd and returns, which is also what you get with no terminal attached, so scripts and --watch are unaffected.

Verification — see Verifying your work

Defaults come from .th-run.json in the checkout, so a claim you run repeatedly needs no flags. Needs Docker running.

Connect — see Connect

Surfaces — see Claude Code surfaces

Spinner tips lead with claimable first-party paid work when available. Otherwise they favor roughly ten contribution opportunities per role; relevant public bounties follow the role.

Pointing the CLI somewhere other than terminalhire.com

Every command talks to https://terminalhire.com unless you say otherwise. If you are working against the dev deployment, or against a copy of the web app running on your own machine, a bare command asks production instead — and production answers about a claim it has never heard of, which reads as "this work does not exist".

For the dev deployment, use thdev instead — it is the same CLI with that origin pinned, so it needs no variable at all and works the same in PowerShell, cmd.exe and bash. VAR=value command is a POSIX-shell one-command assignment: on Windows it does not set anything, and the command silently reaches production.

# the dev deployment — every command, no variable
thdev claim slice <id>
thdev bounties
thdev login

# a web app running on your own machine, on whatever port it serves
TERMINALHIRE_ALLOW_LOCAL_API=1 TERMINALHIRE_API_URL=http://localhost:3000 \
  terminalhire claim slice <id>

The dev deployment has its own credential store, ~/.terminalhire-dev, and every way of pointing at dev uses it: thdev, the variable, an MCP server entry that sets the variable. So thdev login and terminalhire login are separate accounts on disk, neither overwrites the other, and a sign-in through one spelling is visible to the others. Set TERMINALHIRE_DIR to choose a store yourself; it wins over that default. Loopback keeps ~/.terminalhire and still uses the variables above: there is no pinned binary for an arbitrary local port.

Any other host is refused outright rather than quietly falling back to production — writing a claim to the wrong environment is not something a later command can undo. The two loopback flags are separate because they grant different things: the first lets stored credentials reach a local listener, the second lets a browser sign-in happen there, and neither is implied by the other.

Your session belongs to one deployment. Signing in on production does not sign you in on dev, so point login at the same place before anything that says a claim is not registered to you:

thdev login

The claim page prints the right form into its own copy buttons — thdev … on dev, a prefixed command on loopback — so a command copied from a page is already pointed at the deployment that served it.