Quickstart
From nothing to your first agent answer — get an instance, sign in, and send your first message. Five minutes on a ready instance, fifteen if you stand one up on your own machine.
3 min read
This is the shortest path to a working chat with an agent: get an instance, sign in, send a message, watch the reply stream. It takes about five minutes on a ready instance and fifteen if you stand one up on your own machine, and it ends with the screen below — a real answer from an agent over your workspace.
Get an instance
The two editions run the same product — pick by who should operate the stack.
With Docker running, three commands stand up the whole stack on your machine:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tale-project/tale/main/scripts/install-cli.sh | bash
tale init my-project && cd my-project
tale devThe first run pulls images — expect five to ten minutes. When the browser opens, sign up: the first account claims the Owner role and creates your organization. The self-hosted quickstart covers every step in depth, including Windows and troubleshooting.
Send your first message
Open a new chat
Click New chat in the sidebar. The composer at the bottom of the screen is where everything starts: the agent picker on the left, the model picker beside it, and the message field with send on the right. The composer waiting with Assistant and Auto preselected means you are ready to send.
Ask something real
Leave the agent on Assistant and the model on Auto — Tale resolves the best available model at request time. Type a question and send it. The reply streams in token by token; when the agent reasons before answering, a collapsible thinking line appears above the reply.
Where you are now
You have a running instance and an agent that answers. The next fifteen minutes depend on your role: the member journey covers documents and projects, the editor journey publishes your first specialist agent, the admin journey sets up the team and providers, and the developer journey gets you an API key and your first request.