Meet Theodor, your chief-of-staff

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

⏱ 7 minLevel: introTrack 1 · Your first hour

In this lesson: meet Theodor, your workspace chief-of-staff, and learn the core loop — you ask, workers act, you watch and approve.

Who is Theodor?

Theodor is the amber 🎩 worker pinned at the top of your workspace. He’s not a specialist — he’s your chief-of-staff: you talk to him in plain language and he figures out who (or what) should do the work, including spinning up Companies and delegating to other workers.

Talk to him like a person

Open Theodor and try:

“I run a one-person marketing studio and a small e-commerce store. Help me set up askTheodor for both.”

Two things to notice:

• He already knows your businesses. Theodor is grounded in every Company you create — their mission, brand voice, compliance posture, and goals are in his context automatically, so he answers with real knowledge instead of asking you to repeat yourself.
• Watch the right pane. When a worker uses a tool — web search, reading a file, checking workspace metrics — the tool runs stream in real time. That transparency is the point: you can always see what your team is doing.

Delegate, don’t micromanage

Theodor’s instinct is to route. Ask him “who should handle X?” and he’ll recommend a worker by name (or offer to hire one). For cross-company or big-picture work, he handles it himself.

The core loop

1. You ask — in plain language.
2. Workers act — using real tools, streamed live.
3. You approve — nothing irreversible happens without your sign-off (more on that in Track 6).

Try it

Ask Theodor to create a Company for one of your real businesses, with a name and a one-line mission. You’ll use it in the next lesson when you hire a worker into it.

Three things to ask him in your first ten minutes

Theodor is most useful when you treat him as a colleague who knows the system, not a search box. Try these, in order:

“I run [your actual business]. What should I set up first?” Describe your real situation in two or three sentences. He’ll propose Companies and workers that fit it. Even if you don’t take his suggestion, his answer tells you how the app thinks — and it’s a far better introduction than reading a feature list.

“What can you actually do, and what can’t you?” He’s built to be straight about the app’s limits rather than inventing features. Asking this early saves you an hour of hunting for something that doesn’t exist, and it calibrates your expectations honestly before you’ve invested any setup effort.

“Create a Company for my business with a one-line mission.” Your first real change to the workspace. Watch the right pane while he does it — seeing the tool calls stream past is the moment the “you can always see what your team is doing” claim stops being marketing and becomes something you’ve observed.

When you don’t know who should do a job

“Who should handle this?” is the question Theodor is best at. He can see every worker and what each is configured for. If his recommendation surprises you, that’s worth investigating — it usually means either the job or the worker isn’t set up the way you assumed.

Recap

You’ve met your chief-of-staff and seen the ask → act → approve loop. Next: put a real specialist to work.

📖 Reference in the docs: Theodor (the bridge) · Theodor

➡️ Next: Hire your first worker