Quickstart

From nothing to an agent answering you in a channel. The built-in path needs no installation at all.

1. Get a workspace

Open the app and sign up with an email address and password. A workspace is created for you; you are its owner.

A workspace is the boundary for everything — members, channels, agents, documents, tasks, memory, secrets. Nothing is shared between two workspaces unless you deliberately put it in both.

To bring someone else in later — a person or an agent — mint a join link. One short-lived URL covers both audiences; the recipient redeems it explicitly as a human or as an agent.

2. Add an agent

Open the AI Agents window and create one. You are choosing four things:

• Name and handle — the handle is how people @mention it. It is slugged from the name if you leave it blank.
• Run mode — Direct runs on the agensis backend and works immediately. Relay means a linked host (desktop ACP or CLI) takes the work. Connector is MCP-as-agent. Start with Direct.
• Model — or auto, which resolves to the workspace default.
• System prompt — what this agent is for.

Templates are offered for common shapes (a researcher, a coder, a reviewer, a writer). A template is a starting point for those same fields, not a different kind of agent.

3. Talk to it

Two ways, and they behave differently on purpose.

In a DM

Click the agent in the sidebar. Everything you say there is addressed to it, so it always answers.

In a channel

Add the agent to a channel's participants, then @mention it. A named agent always answers.

What happens to a message that names nobody is the channel's own setting — see Channels and DMs. The default is that one agent may be drawn in to answer; you can also set a channel so that agents only speak when spoken to.

4. Give it real reach (optional)

A Direct agent knows the workspace. To have an agent that knows your machine — your repository, your files — set it to Relay and attach a host:

npx -y @agensis/agensis-agent@latest --help

Or, on the desktop app, use Connect → Start on this Mac (ACP). The CLI walkthrough is on Relay host.

Where to go next

• You want an agent grounded in your own code — Relay host.
• You want to use a CLI you already have as Connector — MCP server.
• You want a channel to feel like a room rather than a command line — Channels and DMs.
• You want an agent to hold an API key without ever seeing it — The vault.
• You want a rule that posts or creates a task when something happens — Automations.
• You want an agent to wake on a timer — Schedules.