Talking to pod

You don't learn commands to use pod — you talk to the front desk in plain language, it shows you exactly what it's about to do, and nothing runs until you press Enter.

The front desk

Type pod in your Terminal and press Enter — you're now inside the studio. You'll see a bordered input box with a ❯ waiting for you. That box is the front desk, and it understands plain language — in any language. Telugu, Hindi, English, mixed — say what you want the way you'd say it to a person.

The front desk turns your words into the exact command, then shows it to you before running anything:

❯ make a 30-second teaser for my thriller — telugu, moody
produce "a teaser for my thriller" --duration 30 --language telugu --style "moody" --teaser
  Enter = run · e = edit · n = never mind

Three choices, always the same:

• Enter — run it as shown.
• e — edit the command first (change a number, add a word).
• n — never mind. Nothing happens, nothing is spent.

If you already know the commands, you can type them directly — both ways work. But talking is the intended way, and there's no penalty for it: the front desk translates, you confirm, the same command runs either way. The full command list lives on the commands page if you're curious what's under the hood.

It finds your files

You don't need to know where files live or how to type their paths. Mention a file by a loose name and pod looks for it in your Desktop, Downloads and Documents folders:

❯ produce episode 2 of the basti pdf
  pod finds "Basti V4 EP 1-30.pdf" in Downloads, slices out episode 2

PDFs, .txt and .md screenplays all work. If a PDF holds thirty episodes, pod slices out exactly the one you asked for. If the PDF turns out to be a scan (images of pages, not text), pod says so and asks you to export it as text instead. A finished screenplay automatically switches pod into script-locked mode: scenes adapted faithfully, dialogue kept verbatim in its original language — pod never invents lines. See your own media for bringing in images, clips and audio too.

It remembers you

pod keeps memory between sessions. Close your laptop mid-film, come back tomorrow, type pod — it greets you with where your last film was and offers to resume from the exact checkpoint. Approved work is never redone, and paid renders are never paid for twice.

It also learns your habits. After a couple of productions, whenever a question comes up that you always answer the same way, pod offers "your usual" — say, telugu · 9:16 — instead of asking from scratch. It's still confirmed, never applied silently: you say yes, or you say something else. "The usual" also works when resuming.

The same plain-language ease carries through the whole production. At every review gate you can just describe changes — "make the ending happier", "give Meena a red saree", "use omni for the hero shots" — and pod maps your words onto the right piece of the film. How the gates work is covered in gates; the camera vocabulary pod speaks is in camera language.

Explore mode: when you don't know what you want yet

Sometimes you have a subject, not a film. Type explore with the subject and pod brainstorms with you:

❯ explore "brainstorm some ideas for a coffee brand ad"
  pod pitches 4–5 distinct concepts, each with a look and a format
  pick one → pod produces it

You get four or five genuinely different directions, each with its own visual look and format. Pick the one that lands, and production begins from there.

The input box is built to be forgiving

The box you type into has a few comforts designed for people who write scripts, not code:

• Tab completion. Press Tab and pod finishes what you started — command words and your own episode names. Camera terms complete too, including multi-word ones ("golden ho" + Tab → "golden hour").
• Arrows never eat your text. ↑/↓ browse your history only when the line is empty. If you've typed something, the arrows can never delete it out from under you.
• Paste whole scripts safely. Paste an entire screenplay into the box — it lands as one block, exactly as you copied it, no matter how many lines it has.

help, exit, and Ctrl-C

• help — type it any time to see what you can say and do.
• exit — leaves the studio and returns you to a plain Terminal. Your films stay saved on your computer under episodes/.
• Ctrl-C — cancels whatever job is running, but never kicks you out of the studio. Progress is checkpointed, so a cancelled production resumes later from where it stopped — just say resume.

Ready to say something? Start with your first film, or read how the three working modes decide how much pod checks in with you.