This is the most common thing to do, and the thing most people are reluctant to touch. So first: you can get back to where you were. The mechanism is in Backups and rolling back. This page is about the operation.

Four steps

Select the agent in the environment overview
Choose a configuration template, or create a new one
Choose a provider, enter a key, and verify the connection
Pick a model, check the review screen, then start installing

The review screen lists which file is about to be written and what the backup policy is. It is worth reading before you click.

The model list is fetched live

BootAgent does not carry a hardcoded list of models. It asks the provider’s endpoint what is currently available, which means:

When a provider adds a model, you can select it immediately; you do not wait for a BootAgent release
If a provider does not expose a model list, BootAgent asks you to type the model id rather than showing an empty list as if there were nothing

What to do afterwards

This differs per agent, and BootAgent prints the right command on the result screen. The reasoning is here because the intuitive action is often the wrong one.

Command-line agents (Codex, Claude Code, Opencode, Kilo CLI) read their configuration at startup, so quit the running process and start it again.

Aider needs arguments, and BootAgent assembles the full command for you:

aider --env-file ~/.bootagent/aider.env --model openai/<your model>

OpenClaw is the one to be careful with. Its gateway is a long-lived background process, and many people have registered it as a service that starts at login. The configuration is re-read when the gateway restarts, not when you reopen a terminal command. So run:

openclaw gateway restart

Closing and reopening a terminal will not apply the change, and it is easy to misread that as “BootAgent did not write anything”.

Desktop applications need quitting and reopening.

One extra step the first time you configure OpenClaw

If this is the first time BootAgent has configured OpenClaw, the command it gives you is openclaw onboard rather than a gateway restart. The model service is configured, but the gateway still needs its channels paired before it can do anything — and that is OpenClaw’s own interactive flow, which BootAgent does not do on your behalf.

Getting back to the previous model

Configuration templates keep combinations you saved earlier; apply one directly. See Configuration templates. If what you want back is the configuration that existed before BootAgent touched it, see Backups and rolling back.