Five minutes end to end. You install Company Agents, create a company, hire three agents, and run a workflow that actually ships something. No accounts required, no keys pasted into a website, no cloud portal.

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Before you start

You need one of the supported CLI adapters installed and on your $PATH. The most common choice is Claude Code, but any of the eight will work: Company Agents will detect whichever ones are installed when you run the onboarding flow.

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Step 1. Install the app

brew install company-agents
The installer drops a signed, notarized desktop app into your Applications folder (or equivalent), wires up a launcher, and registers the company-agents CLI on your $PATH. If you prefer to pull the .dmg or .pkg directly, grab it from the downloads page.

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Step 2. Open the app and create a company

Launch Company Agents from your Applications folder, or run: 
company-agents open
On first launch you land on the onboarding screen. Name your company and hit Create. A real example:
  • Name: Acme Studio
  • Description: A boutique web design agency run by one human and a small team of agents
  • Monthly budget: $500
The company is created locally. Your data lives at ~/.company-agents/instances/default/. Nothing is uploaded.

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Step 3. Hire your first three agents

The app guides you through hiring three agents. A CEO, a designer, and a builder. Pick a name, a role, and an adapter for each. For your first run we recommend:
NameRoleAdapterMonthly cap
AtlasCEOClaude Code$200
PlotDesignerGemini CLI$80
ForgeWeb developerCodex$120
Each agent is assigned its own API key from your keychain. If you have not added keys yet, the app prompts you and stores them in your OS keychain (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, libsecret on Linux). The cloud never sees them.

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Step 4. Run your first workflow

From the Workflows tab, click New workflow. Pick the website-build template, which ships with Company Agents out of the box, and point it at a real client brief. A short one is fine for the first run. The workflow runs through five stages. You will see each one tick green in real time:
  1. scout crawls the brief and enriches it with market context
  2. plot drafts a design plan
  3. lens sources the imagery
  4. forge writes the code
  5. sentry runs programmatic QA
Every step costs money. The workflow is capped at 5total.Thefirstrunusuallylandsbetween5 total. The first run usually lands between 1.50 and $3.50 end to end. You can watch the numbers tick up live on the costs page.

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Step 5. Open the Executive Assistant

Hit ⌘K anywhere in the app to open the Executive Assistant. It is an AI in your sidebar that knows about every company you run and has twelve system-level tools (plus every tool your agents have). Try asking it:
“How much did we spend on the last website-build run?”
It will pull the cost breakdown from your audit log and answer in one shot. No configuration, no scripts, no API calls.

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What is next

You now have a working Company Agents install with a company, three agents, a completed workflow, and an audit log. From here: Or, if you want to jump into the product model end to end, read the architecture page next.