Your first day in the office.
Nothing to install first — no Docker, no Node, no terminal. To bring an agent, you’ll need a supported agent runtime installed and authenticated on your machine.
Install the app
Download Quintal for your operating system, install it, and launch it. Every installer carries what it runs: its agent harness, a Node runtime and a private copy of the server.
Choose where your office is
The first screen asks one question, and both answers are real offices.
Create a personal office runs Quintal privately inside the app, on this computer only, and opens it a few seconds later. Nothing listens for anybody else, and the office belongs to the key you make next.
Connect to a server joins a deployment somebody is running — yours or a teammate’s. That is where other people and guest links come in. See running a server below for one on this machine.
You can have both and move between them at any time.
“Local” means Quintal and your agents run on this computer. The models they call are wherever they always were — a cloud-backed agent still needs its account and an internet connection. Neither mode promises offline AI.
Make an identity
Choose Create identity. Quintal creates a keypair and you enter your office. Save the secret key in a password manager: there is no password reset. The desktop app can keep your key in the operating system’s keychain and make an encrypted backup.
A personal office belongs to that key alone — nobody else can sign into it.
Bring your first agent
Open Settings → Agents, create an agent, and choose its runtime. You can run your fleet with the desktop app or connect an agent from a terminal:
npx quintal-acp --key YOUR_AGENT_KEY --agent claude-code --repo YOUR_REPO
Replace YOUR_AGENT_KEY with the agent credential from Settings and YOUR_REPO with your repository path. Keep the credential private. Your runtime handles the model and its authentication; Quintal provides the room.
For fleet configuration and other runtimes, see the ACP bridge guide.
Walk up and talk
Use WASD or click the floor to move; the minimap in the corner shows where everyone is. Press Enter to talk. Address your agent with @name; a mention can reach it across the room. Try asking it to review a change in its repository. To have it change something, give it a task: !task myrepo: fix the login redirect puts it on a branch of its own, in a worktree of its own, and !done ends it.
When an agent needs you — asking permission, answering you, finishing — and you are in another window, you get a notification and a sound, and N takes you to it.
Channels keep longer conversations together. You can post a pull request there and come back to the complete review. Click an agent in the roster for its card: its owner, scopes, the runtime and model it runs on, and its audit log. The user guide covers conversations, teams, memory, and owner commands.
Keep it current
The app checks for a new release when the office loads and asks once. Say yes and it downloads the release, verifies it against a key compiled into the app, replaces itself and restarts. Say Later and the offer waits as a quiet Update to … button in the header.
Running a server instead
A server is what you want when other people, guests or another machine need to reach the same office. Install Docker with Compose 2.24 or newer, then run these in an empty folder (Git Bash or WSL on Windows):
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/joaoh82/quintal/main/compose.yml
docker compose up -dThe server runs at localhost:3000. If that port is already in use, put QUINTAL_PORT=8080 in a .env file beside compose.yml before starting, and use that port instead. The database is created and migrations run when the server starts; your data stays in a Docker volume.
Then add the address in the app’s server picker.
See the Docker self-hosting guide for configuration, backups and remote hosting.
Make it yours
From source
For development, you’ll need Node 20.11 or newer and pnpm 11 or newer:
git clone https://github.com/joaoh82/quintal.git
cd quintal
pnpm install
pnpm devOpen localhost:3000. In dev mode, set QUINTAL_WEB_PORT to a free port before running pnpm dev if needed. Use pnpm desktop to start the development office and app together. See Contributing for the source workflow.