Using Clankie

Start with what you want to do. Clankie can help you think something through, make a draft or picture, remember a preference, and bring in help for a larger job. You do not need to learn agent terminology to talk to him.

Everyday help

Give him a little context and a useful outcome. A few things to try:

• “Turn these scattered notes into a plan for the weekend.”
• “Help me draft a kind, clear reply. Here's what happened.”
• “Compare these three ideas and tell me what you would choose.”
• “Make a birthday-card picture with a sleepy robot in a garden.”

You can steer him as he works: add a constraint, correct an assumption, or ask for a shorter answer. If a request needs a connection he does not have, he should say what is missing. A request to draft a message and a request to send it are different instructions; tell him which outcome you want.

Memory and personality

Tell him what matters, and ask him to keep it: “Remember that I prefer quiet places and short walks.” You can ask what he remembers and correct a stale note. In the local console, /memory lets you inspect, edit, and forget memories directly.

His memories are selected notes, separate from conversation history. Notes stay until forgotten. He can search them, but memory is not a promise to reproduce every past message. The memory reference explains storage and privacy between conversations and Discord rooms.

Clankie has a character of his own. On a DIY installation, /persona lets you shape his name and character; it does not require rebuilding the software.

Making things together

Explain the purpose, audience, and constraints. A useful brief might be: “Help me make a simple website for my bakery. Start with the opening page and show me a preview before publishing anything.”

Ask for the finished file or a preview you can inspect. Files he delivers belong to the conversation, so you can return to the result. Images require an image model; short video generation is a separate, optional capability on a configured DIY installation. A render may take time. Ask what is still running rather than starting a duplicate request.

Bigger jobs and helper agents

Clankie can do work himself or assemble a team. Tell him the outcome, your constraints, and any decisions you want to make yourself. You can ask who is doing what, open a helper's conversation, and steer the work as it develops.

Tell him how you want agents to work: “Commit and push without asking, ask me before official releases, and keep reports short and plain.” Owner defaults apply across projects; a project can override each choice or inherit it. Verification can request independent review and sealing, or making the change, running relevant checks and reading the results. View or change these choices by talking to Clankie or using the app's project settings. Every helper receives the resolved preferences for its project. On a DIY installation, clankie fleet status and clankie doctor --json expose the same workspace preferences for agents you launch yourself. Preferences keep the existing access boundaries.

For DIY users, helper agents use the installed and authenticated tools you choose. Customize Clankie explains the setup. Hosted worker availability depends on the service and plan; the current plans are the source for those limits.

The tiny town in Commons shows the team at work. Select a figure to reach the agent behind it, see their progress, or ask a follow-up. The Bulletin lists every open task, who assigned it and who holds it, with stuck work first. Tap a notice to message whoever holds it.

The app

Messages is home. Clankie is pinned at the top. Start there for a question, an idea, or a piece of work. Agent contacts and shared conversations let you follow a larger job without keeping a terminal open.

The app reaches the same service as your other connected devices. Available controls depend on the host's capabilities and the access granted to that device. You can use Messages without learning the deeper views.

Discord, voice, and game night

On a configured Mac, Clankie can join Discord conversations, speak in voice, play requested YouTube music, and play Pokémon from his own seat in a separate PokeAgents world. These are optional integrations, not part of basic setup.

The official bot supports text, voice, and Activity sharing for existing play, art, animations, demos and audio. Hosted Activity routing is included in the service; customers set up no application or tunnel. The official Activity application and its verification remain release gates. Watching someone else's screen share and publishing Discord Go Live use the separate personal-lab body, with its own explicit opt-in and restrictions. Those distinctions matter when you try something you saw in the promo. Start with Discord and play setup.

Leaving work running

Closing a window does not stop the service. A local Mac must stay awake and online; hosted availability follows its account and resource limits.

For a DIY task that should continue across turns in a Pi-owned conversation, use /goal and explicitly enable /autonomy. Goals have a finite token budget; you can pause the goal or turn continuation off. This is separate from keeping an ordinary conversation open. See ongoing work for the controls and their limits.

Next: how he works explains the service, memory, models, and connections underneath. Get started covers installation and pairing.

Give him a visual persona

On a DIY installation, put PNG/JPEG/WebP images or MOV/MP4/WebM videos in a folder and run clankie persona images set ~/Pictures/clankie-vibe, or choose Persona images in /persona. Check clankie persona images status, then restart Clankie. Top-level files color his vibe: the feel of who he is, not what he looks like. Put physical character references in appearance/; only these feed self-portraits. He uses up to eight stills/contact sheets total. Videos need ffmpeg/ffprobe and each contributes one sheet of ten chronological tiles; audio is ignored. Status lists viewable sheet paths. His written character wins. Voice uses a short description instead of images. clankie persona images clear clears the selection without deleting the originals. Images are sent to your configured models when used. Hosted paths refer to folders already on the hosted machine; this does not upload files from your phone or Mac. See the CLI reference.

Machines and devices

A machine is where agents run. A device is a paired phone or desktop portal. clankie machines shows each machine's Herdr sessions, availability and worker count; add --json for scripts. clankie machines discover refreshes local sessions and SSH candidates without prompting or starting remote software.

Add a machine with clankie machines add pc --ssh my-pc, then inspect clankie machines sessions pc. Connect an existing session with clankie machines sessions pc --connect work --id pc-work. Transcript access is available immediately after adding. Named connections apply without a restart; removing a machine detaches Clankie without stopping its workers. Changing the default workspace still requires clankie restart captain.

clankie herdr opens the full workspace. clankie herdr status prints the machine summary; herdr status --json includes machine rows and default-binding details. Phones and desktop portals remain under clankie pair and clankie devices.