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Quickstart

This guide gets you from zero to a running agent in a few minutes.

Download the latest Tanzanite build for macOS and open it. Tanzanite runs both as a full window and in your menu bar (system tray).

Create an account or sign in with email and password (or Google).

The Tanzanite sign-in screen

The sign-in screen. You can also sign up programmatically — see Authentication.

The left sidebar is the main navigation:

  • Chat — talk to an agent (clearing the active project for general chat).
  • Agents — long-running autonomous agents and their goals.
  • VEMPs — reusable agent building blocks.
  • Projects — your working contexts (cloud or local).
  • Integrations — connect Tanzanite to other systems.
  • Workflows / Workflow Runs — build and monitor automations.
  • Apps — local-first apps that run inside Tanzanite.
  • Memory, Account, Settings — and Admin if you’re an admin.

Open Projects in the sidebar and click New Project. Choose:

  • Cloud project — managed working space, nothing needed on your machine.
  • Local project — Tanzanite opens a native folder picker (“Select project folder”) and requests file-system access to that folder so an agent can read and edit those files.

Projects view with the New Project action

Projects → New Project. See Projects for the difference between cloud and local.

With a project active, open Chat and either ask a quick question or give the agent a goal to kick off an autonomous run. The agent breaks the goal into steps, calls tools, and can spawn subagents for parallel work.

Chat with a goal entered

Entering a goal in Chat.

When an agent wants to take a sensitive action (writing files, running a command), it pauses for your approval. The plan tree shows each step live — reasoning, tool calls, results, and cost — and you can pause, resume with a new budget, redirect, or cancel.

A plan running with an approval prompt

A live plan with an approval prompt.