The four dials

Eklavya’s behaviour is four independent settings. Conflating them is the most common confusion, so learn them as four separate questions. All four can sit in your status bar — see eklavya statusline:

Dial	Question it answers	Values
mode	How hard does Eklavya push?	ambient (default), enforced, off
focus	What does it teach?	concept (default), project, learn
cadence	When does it ask?	interleaved (default), end
difficulty	How hard may the questions get?	auto (default), easy, medium, hard

They combine freely. enforced + learn is an intern who must pass a gate on a topic they chose. ambient + project is a gentle nudge grounded in today’s diff. The one interaction is off: it wins outright and focus is never read.

mode — how hard it pushes

Value	Behaviour	Reach for it when
ambient default	Questions are offered as you work and at the end of a task. Always skippable, never nagging.	You are learning a new stack on your own terms.
enforced	The session quiz must be passed before git commit succeeds — inside Claude Code automatically, and from a bare terminal once you install the git hook.	Onboarding, interns, a codebase where shipping unread code is expensive.
off	Installed but dormant. No questions, no gate, no banner.	A demo, a deadline, a repo you are only passing through.

focus — what it teaches

Value	Asks about	Good for
concept default	The idea behind the code, phrased so the answer transfers to any codebase. Your diff is the motivation, not the subject.	Learning a stack.
project	The code just written — the file, the line, the decision.	Learning a codebase.
learn	A topic you name, taught in prerequisite order, using your real code as the worked example wherever the work touches it.	Learning something on purpose.

Note

focus: "learn" needs focus_topic set as well. Without one the planner refuses with reason: "no_topic" and you get no questions.

cadence — when it asks

Value	Behaviour	Good for
interleaved default	One question at a time, the moment a concept is logged. A quiz Eklavya offers is capped at one question under this cadence, the end-of-task sweep included — never a batch. exceptions enforced mode plans the full remaining budget, because the commit gate needs enough passing answers to open; so does a quiz you asked for by name, or one aimed at a topic or concept you named.	Learning while the agent works — the thing the tool is for.
end	Nothing until the task is finished, then whatever the budget has left, asked one question at a time.	Pairing, demos, deep focus.

interleaved does not mean more questions. It moves the same budget earlier, and caps every quiz it offers at one question — a budget it never reaches is simply not spent, and those concepts come back as review in a later session. If being interrupted is the problem rather than the timing, raise min_minutes_between_checkpoints before switching to end.

difficulty — how hard it may get

This is the one dial you normally earn rather than set. On auto, every project starts at easy and climbs on evidence. Setting a literal value pins the band and stops progression. See Levels and tiers.

Changing a dial

Two ways, both equivalent:

In Claude Code

/eklavya:mode              # show all four, then change any of them
/eklavya:mode project      # set focus to project
/eklavya:level medium      # pin this project's difficulty band

From a terminal

eklavya config set mode enforced            # for you, everywhere
eklavya config set mode enforced --repo     # for this project only
eklavya config set focus learn --topic caching
eklavya config set cadence end

Caution

Repo settings beat personal ones. A value written with --repo lands in .eklavya.json at the repository root and applies to everyone who works in that project — including overriding a learn topic a teammate set for themselves. That is exactly what you want for pinning enforced on an onboarding repo, and exactly what you do not want by accident. The session banner names any setting a repo is overriding, so it never changes silently.