Install & first run

🎬 Video for this lesson is in production — the written walkthrough below covers everything in the meantime.

⏱ 6 minLevel: introTrack 1 · Your first hour

In this lesson: get askTheodor running and understand what you’re looking at on first launch.

What you’ll do

1. Download and open askTheodor.
2. Take in the Village — your (currently empty) company, seen from above.
3. Connect one AI provider so your workers can think.

1. Download & launch

Grab the latest build for your platform and open it. askTheodor is a local-first desktop app — it runs entirely on your machine, and your data stays there. A 7-day full-feature trial starts on first launch; no account required to look around.

2. The Village

The first thing you land on is The Village — a painted, top-down map of your workspace. Right now it’s quiet: no Companies, no workers, just the wall and the gates. That’s expected. By the end of Track 1 there’ll be a hut on this map with your first worker in it.

Why a map?

askTheodor models real work as a small organisation — Companies are neighborhoods, workers are residents, Kafenio is the tavern where the team talks. The map keeps a growing workforce legible at a glance.

3. Connect a brain

Workers think using an AI provider you choose. Open Settings → Models / Providers and connect one (paste an API key, or point at a local model). You can mix providers later — a frontier model for the strategist, a cheap or local one for routine clerks — but one is enough to start.

Try it

Connect a single provider now. You don’t need to configure anything else — the defaults are sensible, and the next lesson puts your provider to work.

What you can already do, right now

Before hiring anyone, three things are already available — and the first one is worth doing today:

Prove the privacy claim to yourself. Connect the built-in or a local model, turn off your Wi-Fi, and ask a worker to summarise a document on your machine. It answers. Nothing left the building because there was nowhere for it to go. Ten seconds of work, and it’s the fastest way to understand what “local-first” means in practice rather than as a slogan.

Ask a question about a file you don’t want to upload anywhere. A contract, a client’s spreadsheet, last year’s accounts. On a local model this is a question you can safely ask that you’d hesitate to paste into a cloud chat.

Look around without committing anything. No account, no card, seven days. You can explore the Village, browse the worker catalog, and read what each profession comes pre-wired with before you decide it’s for you.

Set a budget before you set anything else

If you connected a cloud provider, open Settings → Cost and set a global budget with hard-stop on now, while you’re thinking about it. It takes thirty seconds and it’s the difference between an experiment and an unbounded one.

Recap

You’ve installed a local-first app, met the Village, and given your future workers something to think with. Next: meet Theodor, the one worker who’s already here.

📖 Reference in the docs: Install & connect a provider · Providers

➡️ Next: Meet Theodor, your chief-of-staff