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askTheodor Docs

Your first hour

You can be genuinely productive in under an hour. Here’s a path that shows off the core loop without drowning you in settings.

1. Say hello to Theodor (5 min)

Click the amber 🎩 Theodor entry at the top of the sidebar, or + New chat. Theodor is your chief-of-staff — talk to him in plain language. Try:

“What can you do, and how should I set up askTheodor for a one-person marketing business?”

Watch the right pane: when a worker uses a tool (web search, file read, browser), you’ll see the tool runs stream in real time. This is the core loop — you ask, workers act, you watch and approve.

2. Install a demo team (5 min)

Don’t build from scratch yet. Open Settings → Demos and Install a pack — a ready-made Company with workers and routines. Now you have a roster to explore. (Packs are additive; install more than one.)

3. Give your team some knowledge (10 min)

Open the 📚 Library and upload a few reference documents (PDF, Markdown, Word) — a brand guide, a product spec, past reports. Workers automatically quote your Library when it’s relevant (this is RAG). The more you put here, the more grounded their work becomes.

4. Meet a worker (5 min)

Click any worker to open their Profile — a character sheet with their skills, tools, level, and reviews. Click Start chat and give them a small, concrete task:

“Summarize the attached brand guide into five bullet points and save it to the Library.”

5. Run your first Plan (15 min)

Open 📋 Plans and apply a template (or ask Theodor: “Draft a plan to produce a one-page competitor analysis.”). Theodor proposes a Plan — a multi-step project with tasks assigned to workers. It waits for your Approve. Approve it, and the background scheduler dispatches the tasks; a live progress bar shows it advancing. When workers finish, the Reviewer critiques the output before it’s marked done.

6. Set your safety rails (10 min)

Before you let anything run unattended, glance at three things:

  • Settings → Cost → Budgets — set a monthly spend cap (with hard-stop on, the run blocks when exceeded).
  • Settings → Providers → 🧯 Per-tool call limits — cap how many times a tool can fire per run.
  • The Autonomy switch on the Dashboard — your one-click pause everything kill-switch.

Where to go next

In practice

What you’ll have at the end of the hour: a working Company you didn’t design from scratch, a Library holding your own reference material, one worker you’ve given a real task to, and one Plan that ran start to finish with the Reviewer checking it. That’s the entire loop — everything afterwards is more of it.

Two examples of what step 5 looks like with a real brief:

  • A one-page competitor analysis. Theodor drafts a Plan — research each competitor, pull pricing and positioning, synthesise into a comparison, write it up. You approve once; the tasks dispatch to workers and you read the result, instead of steering the same research through a chat window turn by turn.
  • This week’s report in the shape of last quarter’s. Put the older reports in the Library, then ask for the new one. Because the worker retrieves your actual documents, the structure and vocabulary match — you’re editing, not rewriting.

Install a demo pack even if you know what you want to build. Reading a working setup — how a Company, its workers and their routines fit together — teaches the model of the app faster than any page here. Then rewrite the missions for your own business; a pack left unedited produces generic output.

Do step 6 before you close the laptop, not after. The budget cap, the per-tool call limits and the Autonomy switch are what make unattended work safe to leave running. Ten minutes now heads off the two failure modes that actually bite: a loop that burns money, and an action you’d have wanted to see first.

Give a worker one concrete task, not a vague brief. “Summarise this brand guide into five bullets and save it to the Library” produces something you can judge. “Help me with marketing” doesn’t — and the disappointing answer will look like a model problem when it was an instruction problem.

🎓 Learn it hands-on: Install & first run · Hire your first worker

Terms in this page

  • Demo pack — a preconfigured bundle of a Company, workers, and routines you can install in one click to get a working setup instantly.
  • RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) — the technique where the app retrieves relevant documents from your Library and gives them to the worker, so answers are grounded in your material instead of guessed.
  • Plan — a multi-step project modeled as a set of tasks (with dependencies) that the orchestrator dispatches to workers and advances automatically.
  • Reviewer — a built-in “critic” worker that checks finished work and either approves it or sends it back for rework.
  • Budget / hard-stop — a spending cap; with hard-stop enabled, a run is blocked once the cap is reached (rather than just warning you).
  • Autonomy kill-switch — a single control that pauses all unattended activity (plans, routines, scheduled jobs) at once.
  • Scheduler — the background process that wakes periodically to advance running Plans and fire due Routines.