Quickstart
Create a space, set a project folder, spawn your first Claude agent, and give it a task.
This walks you from a freshly installed Agent Grid to a Claude agent working on your project, in under a minute.
You need claude on your PATH. If you don't have it yet, see CLI prerequisites.
1. Create a space
A space is a tab in the title bar. Each space owns one project folder and one canvas worth of panes.
Press CmdTCtrlT to create a new space. You'll see a fresh empty canvas.
2. Set the project folder
Drag a folder from Finder, Explorer, or your file manager and drop it onto the empty canvas. That folder becomes the space's project folder — the working directory for every new Claude, Codex, terminal, and Git pane in this space.
The space tab picks up the folder's name once the drop completes.
Dropping a folder sets the project folder; it doesn't spawn a pane. Dropping an image or video file on the canvas spawns a pane for that file. Other file types — including markdown — are not handled by canvas drop; to put a note on the canvas, write the markdown into .agent-grid/notes-inbox/.
3. Spawn your first Claude agent
Two ways:
- Direct shortcut — press Cmd1Ctrl1 to spawn a Claude pane at the cursor.
- Spawn menu — press CmdNCtrlN and choose Claude Code. The menu is also reachable by right-clicking on empty canvas.
The pane opens with the claude CLI running inside it, scoped to the project folder you set in step 2.
4. Give it a task
Click into the pane and type a request the way you would in a normal Claude Code terminal session:
Look at the README and tell me what this project does.Press EnterEnter. The agent reads the file and replies inside the pane.
5. Add more
Now that you have one pane, the rest of Agent Grid opens up. The spawn-menu order maps directly to Cmd1Ctrl1 … Cmd0Ctrl0:
- Cmd2Ctrl2 — Codex pane (needs
codexinstalled; see CLI prerequisites). - Cmd3Ctrl3 — Antigravity pane (needs
agyinstalled). - Cmd4Ctrl4 — plain terminal in the same project folder.
- Cmd5Ctrl5 — embedded code editor.
- Cmd6Ctrl6 — source control pane.
- Cmd7Ctrl7 — browser pane.
- Cmd8Ctrl8 — note pane.
- Cmd9Ctrl9 — decorative title pane (section header on the canvas).
- Cmd0Ctrl0 — Insert media picker (drops image or video panes at the cursor).
Pan the canvas by holding SpaceSpace and dragging. Zoom under the cursor with CmdScrollCtrlScroll.
Where to next
- Core concepts — canvas, spaces, panes, and how they fit together.
- Agents and workers — what a master is and how it spawns workers via MCP.
- Orchestrating agents — the review-loop pattern with builder, qa, and security workers.
- Keyboard shortcuts — the full binding reference.