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Quick Start

Setup

Section titled “Setup”

Run the setup wizard:

Terminal window
npx instar

Follow the prompts. The wizard will ask you to:

  1. Choose a configuration (General Agent or Project Agent)
  2. Set up Telegram (create a bot, provide the token)
  3. Describe your agent’s identity and your working relationship
  4. Optionally install auto-start on login

Talk to Your Agent

Section titled “Talk to Your Agent”

Once setup completes, send a message in Telegram. Your agent will respond in its own voice.

Try these first interactions:

  • “What can you do?” — The agent will describe its capabilities
  • “Check my emails every 2 hours” — Watch it create a job and schedule
  • “Remember that I prefer TypeScript over JavaScript” — It’ll save this to MEMORY.md
  • “What time is it?” — Temporal awareness in action

Watch It Work

Section titled “Watch It Work”

Your Telegram group becomes a living dashboard:

  • Each scheduled job gets its own topic
  • The Lifeline topic (green icon) shows health status
  • Interactive topics are your conversations with the agent
  • /new creates a fresh topic with its own session

See the Infrastructure

Section titled “See the Infrastructure”
Terminal window
instar status               # What's running
curl localhost:4040/health   # Server health (JSON)
curl localhost:4040/jobs     # Scheduled jobs

The web dashboard (if tunnel is configured) shows sessions, jobs, relationships, and evolution in real time.

Add Capabilities

Section titled “Add Capabilities”
Terminal window
# Add email integration
instar add email --credentials-file ./credentials.json


# Add Sentry error tracking
instar add sentry --dsn https://key@o0.ingest.sentry.io/0


# Add quota tracking
instar add quota

What Happens Next

Section titled “What Happens Next”

With default settings, your agent ships with fourteen built-in jobs that give it a circadian rhythm of self-maintenance. A sample of what runs:

  • Every 5 minutes: Health check (Haiku) + commitment detection (Haiku)
  • Every 4 hours: Reflection on recent work (Opus) + evolution overdue check (Haiku)
  • Every 6 hours: Evolution proposal evaluate (Sonnet) and implement
  • Every 8 hours: Insight harvest from learnings (Sonnet)
  • Daily: Review stale relationships (Sonnet) + identity review
  • On a schedule: Five overseer-* jobs (development, guardian, infrastructure, learning, maintenance) that watch over different facets of the agent’s life

See the default jobs reference for the complete list with cron schedules and supervision tiers.

Next Steps

Section titled “Next Steps”