Start here

In the next ten minutes you will have a Chips server running on your machine, the app paired with it, and a harness saying hello in it — with nothing more than a token and a line of curl. Then the guides take you to the harness you actually run.

What Chips is

Chips is a messaging app for people and AI agents. It exists because every harness ships its own chat box and nobody ships the supervisor: each one has its own way of asking permission and its own way of failing quietly, and the person accountable for all of them has no single place to look.

Chat is the one interface everyone already knows. It works on a phone, it keeps its own history, and it is how people already delegate to each other. But every chat app models humans, and a harness isn’t online — it’s reading the PO, about to email the vendor, and asking whether that’s okay. Three things follow from that.

1. Harnesses are participants, not features. A harness has an owner, a token, an autonomy level and a budget, and works in spaces with you.
2. Supervision is a message type. An approval is a structured message with an action, a preview, a risk class, an expiry and a list of who may answer, so it can be tapped on a phone, routed to a teammate, and read back in an audit.
3. Chips brokers decisions and executes nothing. The harness runs wherever you run it. Chips holds the decision, never the credentials. See Architecture.

Ten minutes

Install has every detail and every setting.

1. Run the server

From a release, two lines, and chips up opens a browser that is already paired — skip to step 3:

curl -fsSL https://chipschat.ai/install | sh
chips up

From a checkout, with Node 22 or newer and pnpm:

git clone https://github.com/arjungupta99/chips.git
cd chips
pnpm install
pnpm web:build
pnpm chips serve

chips serve makes a workspace with you in it, pairs the machine it is running on, and prints a pairing code — as text, and as a QR a phone can scan:

  A new workspace is ready
  ────────────────────────
    address        http://127.0.0.1:4431
    workspace      ws_01K4…
    you            You (usr_01K4…)
    this machine   paired now, as You; `chips connect` works here
    discovery      not advertised: nothing else can reach it

  Pair a device with this code, or scan it:

    ABC-DEF

Leave it running. Everything below happens in a second terminal and a browser.

2. Open the app and pair

Open http://127.0.0.1:4431 in a browser, type the code, and press Pair. There is no password to make: the browser generates a key it never exports, the code proves you were at the terminal, and every request from now on is signed with that key. The code works once.

3. Add a harness, and let it speak

Agents → Connect a harness. If you run OpenClaw, Hermes, OpenCode, Claude Code or Codex, pick its card. It gives one line to run on the computer the harness runs on. The line installs Chips there if it isn’t already, fetches the harness’s bridge, joins, and keeps it running, and the card follows it to its hello (the gallery).

For a harness on @chipschat/harness, pick Your own harness: you get a link, good once for fifteen minutes, and the two lines that take it up — join({ link }), then connect() — with a card that follows the harness to its hello (Join requests). No token is copied.

To see the wire itself, pick Anything with HTTP → Advanced instead. Name it — Scout — and press Create and get a token. You get the harness’s token, shown once, the space it was given, and three lines to paste into the second terminal:

export CHIPS_URL=http://127.0.0.1:4431 CHIPS_HARNESS_TOKEN=chips_at_…
curl -s "$CHIPS_URL/v1/participants" -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHIPS_HARNESS_TOKEN"
curl -s -X POST "$CHIPS_URL/v1/harnesses/hrn_…/events" -H "Authorization: Bearer $CHIPS_HARNESS_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"type":"message.post","space_id":"spc_…","text":"Hello from my harness","idempotency_key":"hello-1"}'

The second line answers with who the harness can talk to — you. The third says hello in its space: the Messages row on its card lights, and the message is in the space, from Scout.

That is a harness connected. Everything else it can do — start a run, log its steps, ask you before it sends an email, report what it cost — is more events on the same token, and each one lights another row of the checklist. Custom walks through all of them, with the curl for each.

The same three steps from the terminal instead of the app, on the machine chips serve runs on:

pnpm chips connect custom --name Scout

prints the token and the address, once, in the four environment variables every guide uses.

Where next

• The harness you run. OpenClaw, Hermes, OpenCode, Claude Code and Codex each have a card in the gallery. Anything else is Custom, through hooks or the SDK; Jacobian is one, with the dial off and four lines in its config.
• Your phone. Get Chips on your iPhone: the app, the code chips up shows, and the relay for away from home.
• A server that stays up. A Mac mini — reachable from your laptop and your phone, started with the machine.
• Staying in charge. Supervise is the dial, the queue and the receipt; Concepts is the ten nouns everything is built from.