What this is. A collection of short, independent tips for working with biorouter day to day — prompting, model choice, context and session hygiene, extensions, safety, cost, and workflows. Status: Current. Audience: end users
Each tip below stands alone; read the group that matches what you are doing rather than working through the page in order. The tips assume you already have biorouter installed and a provider configured — if not, start with biorouter in 5 minutes.
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard biorouter uses to connect to pluggable tool servers, which it calls extensions.
biorouter is an AI agent, which means you can prompt biorouter to perform tasks for you like opening applications, running shell commands, automating workflows, writing code, browsing the web, and more.
You don't need fancy language or special syntax to prompt biorouter. Talk with biorouter like you would talk to a friend. You can even use slang or say please and thank you; biorouter will understand.
You don't need to get it right the first time. Iterating on prompts and tools is part of the workflow.
Your experience with biorouter is shaped by your choice of LLM, as it handles all the planning while biorouter manages the execution. When choosing an LLM, consider its tool support, specific capabilities, and associated costs. See Choosing a model provider.
Use lead/worker mode to have biorouter use a "lead" model for early planning before handing the task to a lower-cost "worker" model for execution.
LLMs have context windows, which are limits on how much conversation history they can retain. Once exceeded, they may forget earlier parts of the conversation. Monitor your token usage and start new sessions as needed.
Press Cmd+Option+Shift+G (macOS) or Ctrl+Alt+Shift+G (Windows/Linux) and send a prompt to start a new session instantly.
Help biorouter remember how you like to work by using .biorouterhints and other context files or skills for permanent project preferences, and the Memory extension for things you want biorouter to dynamically recall later. Both can help save valuable context window space while keeping your preferences available.
Turning on too many extensions can degrade performance. Enable only essential extensions and tools to improve tool selection accuracy, save context window space, and stay within provider tool limits.
Tip. Consider enabling Code Mode, an alternative approach to tool calling that discovers tools on demand.
biorouter's capabilities are extensible. As an MCP client, biorouter can connect to your apps and services through extensions, allowing it to work across your entire workflow.
You can turn a successful session into a reusable "workflow" to share with others or use again later — no need to start from scratch.
Write workflows that check your current state before acting, so they can be run multiple times without causing any errors or duplication.
Include informative log messages in your workflows for each major step to make debugging and troubleshooting easier should something fail.
You can customize how much supervision biorouter needs. Choose between full autonomy, requiring approval before actions, or simply chatting without any actions.
biorouter is often eager to make changes. You can stop it from changing specific files by creating a .biorouterignore file, listing all the file paths you want it to avoid. See the Developer extension for how these access controls are applied.
Administrators can use an allowlist to restrict biorouter to approved extensions only. This helps prevent risky installs from unknown MCP servers. See Managed / enterprise policy for the centrally administered allow, ask, and deny rules.
Commit your code changes early and often. This allows you to rollback any unexpected changes.
Regularly update biorouter to benefit from the latest features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. See Update Biorouter for the desktop and CLI upgrade paths.
- biorouter in 5 minutes — the first-task walkthrough these tips assume you have completed.
- Choosing a model provider — the provider and model details behind the "choose the right LLM" tip.
- Context engineering — the full treatment of hints, skills, memory, and workflows touched on above.
- Permission modes — how to set the level of supervision biorouter needs.
- Common problems and fixes — what to do when a tip above does not resolve the behaviour you are seeing.