Quickstart
This guide gets you from zero to a running agent in a few minutes.
1. Install the app
Section titled “1. Install the app”Download the latest Tanzanite build for macOS and open it. Tanzanite runs both as a full window and in your menu bar (system tray).
2. Sign in
Section titled “2. Sign in”Create an account or sign in with email and password (or Google).

The sign-in screen. You can also sign up programmatically — see Authentication.
3. Find your way around
Section titled “3. Find your way around”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.
4. Create a project
Section titled “4. Create a project”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 → New Project. See Projects for the difference between cloud and local.
5. Start a chat or a plan
Section titled “5. Start a chat or a plan”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.

Entering a goal in Chat.
6. Review, approve, and watch it run
Section titled “6. Review, approve, and watch it run”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 live plan with an approval prompt.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Learn how Projects work.
- Set up Workflows & Schedules for recurring automation.
- Understand the Harness that governs agent behavior.