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Troubleshooting

Installation

Minimum System Requirements

If installation fails or the application does not start, verify that your system meets the minimum supported platform requirements. NEX runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, but older operating system versions or incompatible system libraries can prevent it from launching correctly.

Check the following:

  • Linux (amd64): glibc version 2.14 or later (e.g., Ubuntu 12.04+, Debian 8+, RHEL/CentOS 7+).
  • macOS (Apple Silicon): macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later.
  • Windows: Windows 10 or later with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) and a compatible Linux distribution with glibc version 2.14 or later.

If your environment is below these baselines, upgrade the operating system or system libraries before attempting installation again.

nex Command Not Found

If your system cannot locate the nex command, the installation directory may not be included in your PATH environment variable. You can verify this by running:

which nex

Get-Command nex

If the command returns a path, nex is correctly installed and discoverable. If it returns no result, you need to add the installation directory to your PATH and then restart the terminal session (or reload your shell configuration) before trying again.

Usage & Compliance

Terminal Colors Not Displayed Correctly

NEX uses standard libraries to render structured terminal output, including colors, panels, tables, and progress indicators. These visual elements rely on the terminal emulator supporting standard ANSI escape sequences and color capabilities.

If your terminal does not support ANSI colors, or if color support is disabled, the interface may appear unformatted or lose visual distinctions between elements.

To ensure correct rendering, verify that your terminal supports:

  • ANSI escape sequences for styled text
  • 256-color or TrueColor (24‑bit) support for full visual fidelity
  • A correctly configured TERM environment variable

Most modern terminal emulators (such as iTerm2, Windows Terminal, GNOME Terminal, Alacritty, and Kitty) support these features by default.

If colors are not displayed correctly, check the following:

  • Ensure your terminal emulator supports ANSI colors.
  • Verify that the TERM variable is not set to a minimal value such as dumb.
  • When using remote environments (SSH, containers, CI systems), confirm that color support is propagated to the session.

Issues with tool calling capabilities

If you experience unreliable tool calling or incorrect outputs, the underlying LLM may not meet the quality requirements for NEX. Running models that are not sufficiently capable can significantly increase hallucination rates and reduce tool-calling accuracy.

NEX ships with a set of officially supported and validated LLMs. Using models outside of this compatibility list is the user’s responsibility and may lead to degraded performance or unexpected behavior. Whenever possible, rely on officially supported LLMs.

If you must use a different model, you can contact contact@chipnexus.ai to request dedicated support for validation and integration.

External Internet Requests

NEX supports multiple deployment configurations with different network requirements. The behavior of external internet requests depends on the selected licensing and deployment model:

  • Cloud Users (default configuration): All requests are routed through the ChipNexus infrastructure. The tool performs periodic license validation and forwards LLM requests to a dedicated ChipNexus API Gateway. All traffic is encrypted and transmitted over HTTPS (port 443). To ensure correct operation, outbound access to this port must be allowed on the user's system.

  • Enterprise Users (offline license): In this configuration, license validation is performed locally. Only LLM requests are forwarded to the ChipNexus API Gateway, still using encrypted communication over port 443. No additional telemetry or application data is transmitted externally.

  • Enterprise Users (offline license with local LLM): This is a fully air-gapped configuration. All processing is performed locally, and no external network communication occurs. NEX does not exchange any data with external services in this mode.

In deployments where outbound internet access is permitted, NEX also performs a startup check to determine whether a newer version is available. This check uses a secure connection and queries the official Homebrew formula repository at ChipNexus/homebrew-nex. If the machine does not have an internet connection, the check fails silently and no update notification is shown. In that case, users are responsible for keeping their installation up to date manually.