Hidden Gems & Power User Tips

Unlock the full potential of Boring with these advanced features and lesser-known tricks.

🛠️ Deep Debugging with Profiles

You might know about lite vs full profiles, but did you know you can customize them?

Why `boring_debug_code` Vanished?

If you are in lite mode (default), advanced debugging tools are hidden to save context. To get them back:

# Temporarily enable full toolkit for a session
export BORING_MCP_PROFILE=full
boring start

Custom Profiles

Create custom_profile.toml to mix-and-match:

[profiles.my_debug]
include = ["boring_read_file", "boring_debug_code", "boring_security_scan"]
exclude = ["boring_commit"]

🧠 Brain Surgery

Your AI learns from mistakes (~/.boring/brain), but sometimes it learns the wrong thing.

View Your Brain

Check what patterns are currently stored:

cat ~/.boring/brain/patterns.json

Force Unlearning

If Boring keeps making a mistake it "learned" to do, you can manually edit this file or use the boring_learn tool explicitly:

boring-route "Forget the pattern about checking for requirements.txt"

🕵️ Mastering the Router

The boring() router uses semantic scoring, not just keywords.

Triggering Analysis

To force a "Sequential Thinking" session, use keywords like:

"Think about..."
"Analyze deeply..."
"Reason through..."

# Triggers sequentialthinking tool
boring("Think about the race condition in the auth module")

External Knowledge (Context7)

You don't need to leave your IDE to check documentation.

# Queries external docs via Context7
boring("How do I use the new React useActionState hook?")

Pro Tip: Be specific with library names. "Query PyTorch docs" works better than "Query ML docs".

🛡️ Shadow Mode Tricks

Strict Mode for Code Review

You can use Shadow Mode as a forced code review tool, even for safe operations.

export SHADOW_MODE_LEVEL=STRICT
boring-route "Refactor the login page"

Now, every single file write will pop up a diff for you to approve. It's like an interactive PR review.

🔍 HyDE Search Secrets

Boring uses HyDE (Hypothetical Document Embeddings) for search.

Bad Query: "auth error"
Good Query: "Why does the login function return a 401 error when the token is valid?"

Why? HyDE generates a fake "perfect answer" and searches for code that looks like that. Phrasing as a question helps it hallucinate a better search target.