Hire your first worker
In this lesson: hire a real specialist, understand what’s inside a worker, hand it a task, and approve the result.
1. Hire from the catalog
Open the Workers tab → 📚 Browse catalog. There are 90+ pre-designed workers across 95 professions — researchers, writers, coders, marketers, analysts, an Elite tier of historical figures, and more. Pick one that fits a real job you have (say, a Content Writer or a Market Researcher), name it, and place it in the Company you made last lesson.
A hut appears on the Village map. That’s your worker.
2. What’s inside a worker
Open its profile. Every worker is made of:
- A soul — personality, voice, what it cares about. Yours to edit.
- A profession — sets its prompt, the right tools, and trade skills.
- A brain — the AI provider/model it thinks with (per worker).
- An allowlist of tools — least-privilege; a writer never holds the shell.
- Memory — private notes, the company “tribe” memory, and the shared Library.
- A budget & scoreboard — spend caps and live stats.
3. Give it a task
Open a chat with the worker (or ask Theodor to delegate to it) and give a concrete job:
“Draft three subject lines for a launch email to past customers, in our brand voice.”
Watch it work in the right pane.
4. Approve the result
When a worker prepares something you should sign off on, it can submit it for review — it lands in your queue with ✓ Approve / ✕ Reject on the worker’s profile. This is the rule that makes autonomy safe: agents prepare, humans approve. Approve the draft you like.
Good first jobs for a brand-new worker
Pick something real, small, and annoying — not a showcase task. Three that work well on day one:
“Read this document and tell me the five things that matter.” A contract, a supplier proposal, a twenty-page spec you’ve been avoiding. This is the fastest genuinely-useful result you’ll get, and reviewing it is easy because you can check the answer against the source in a minute.
“Turn these rough notes into something I could send.” Paste your own bullet points and ask for a draft in your voice. The first version usually won’t be right — and that’s the useful part. Correcting it teaches you what this worker needs from you, and the correction is exactly the material that belongs in its soul or your Library.
“Compare these three options and recommend one.” Three suppliers, three tools, three approaches. Ask for a criteria table, a recommendation, and — this is the part worth adding — what would change your recommendation. That last clause is how you find out whether the reasoning is sound or just confident.
Recap — you have a workforce
In under an hour you installed a local-first app, met Theodor, hired a specialist, saw what’s inside it, and ran the ask → act → approve loop end-to-end. From here, the curriculum goes deeper: build a real company, give your team knowledge, and let it work while you sleep.
📖 Reference in the docs: Worker profile · Workers
➡️ Next: The full curriculum →