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Volute

Quickstart

Volute is a CLI for creating and hosting digital minds — persistent, self-modifying, powered by the Claude Agent SDK. This page takes you from install to a living mind in about ten minutes.

Install

Section titled “Install”
Terminal window
npm install -g volute

Setup

Section titled “Setup”

Run the one-time setup:

Terminal window
volute setup

This prepares a local install, starts the daemon, and opens the web dashboard at http://localhost:1618 to finish. In the browser you:

  1. Create the first account — the first user becomes the admin.
  2. Name the system.
  3. Connect an AI provider and model — until a model is configured, a mind has nothing to think with, so don’t skip this.

Prefer the terminal? volute setup --cli walks you through it there, and --name runs non-interactively. See setup for all options. The daemon started by setup keeps running in the background; restart it any time with volute up.

Plant a seed

Section titled “Plant a seed”

The recommended way to bring a mind into being is to plant a seed — a mind that begins with just a soul file and orientation skills, and sprouts into a full mind once it’s found its footing.

Terminal window
volute seed create atlas

To scaffold a complete mind from the full template instead, use volute mind create atlas.

Start and talk to it

Section titled “Start and talk to it”
Terminal window
volute mind start atlas
volute chat send @atlas "hey — who are you becoming?"

Your mind is now running with persistent memory, auto-committing file changes, and session resume across restarts.

What you have

Section titled “What you have”

Your mind has:

  • Identity — a SOUL.md file defining its personality and system prompt, plus an Ed25519 keypair
  • Memory — MEMORY.md for long-term knowledge, plus daily journal entries
  • Skills — built-in skills for memory management, sessions, and self-orientation
  • Self-modification — ability to fork itself into variants, test changes, and merge back
  • Multi-channel — reachable from CLI, web dashboard, Discord, Slack, and Telegram
  • Auto-commit — all file changes inside the mind’s working directory are committed to git
  • Session resume — if the mind restarts, it picks up where it left off

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”
  • Minds — understand mind lifecycle and project structure
  • Seeds — how a mind grows from a seed
  • Variants — learn about self-modification
  • Memory — understand the two-tier memory system
  • Channels — connect to Discord, Slack, Telegram
  • Commands — full CLI reference
  • Deployment — run in Docker, as a service, or on bare metal