Set up a team

The owner's walkthrough: build the company brain and everyone's assistants in one run, hand each person their assistant, connect Slack, approve changes, add people, and handle someone leaving.

You will be able to run a team of assistants that share one company brain.

You run this once, as the owner, from the Crads app on your own computer. If you have not read it yet, Crads for teams explains what you are building and who can change what.

Before you start#

  • A hosting API token with read and write access, for the account the servers should live in: Hetzner or DigitalOcean. It stays on your computer and is never stored.
  • A GitHub account. The company brain and one repository per person are made in it, all private.
  • A decision about Claude. Each person signs in on their own assistant, with a company Claude seat or their own plan. The company agent needs one too.

Build the team#

  1. Open the app. On the first screen choose Set up a team (under New here? if this computer already has an assistant).
  2. Give the team a short name, like acme, and list the people, one per line. Want an assistant for yourself too? Add your own name.
  3. Pick the hosting company, paste the token, and choose Check the token, then Build the team.
  4. Sign in to GitHub when the app shows a code.

The app then makes the company brain and each person's repository, builds the servers one at a time (the company agent first), gives each server its keys, and joins it to the team. Each server takes a few minutes on first boot.

Hand each person their assistant#

The last screen lists, for each person:

  1. Their assistant's name, for example acme-jess.
  2. They install Crads, choose I already have one and type that name. The app shows them a key.
  3. On your computer, find their assistant in the list, choose Add a device under it and paste their key. Their computer is in, and yours stays in as the admin.
  4. They sign in to Claude from the Terminal tab.

Then fill in company/about.md, voice.md, policies.md and prices.md in the company brain on GitHub. Every assistant reads them first.

Connect Slack#

Open the company agent in the app (its name ends in -agent), sign it in to Claude from its Terminal tab, then open its Team page:

  1. Choose Copy the manifest, then at api.slack.com/apps choose Create New App, From a manifest, your workspace, and paste it.
  2. Under Basic Information, in App-Level Tokens, generate a token with the connections:write scope. It starts xapp-.
  3. Under Install App, install it and copy the Bot User OAuth Token. It starts xoxb-.
  4. Paste both on the Team page and choose Connect Slack.

Invite the agent to a channel and @mention it to try it. This is separate from connecting Slack to one person's assistant; each person can still do that for their own.

Triage a shared inbox#

If the team shares a mailbox (hello@, info@), the company agent can read it:

  1. Open the company agent in the app and connect the shared mailbox on its Connections page (see connecting Google).
  2. On its Team page, under The shared inbox, pick that connection and choose Start triaging it.

Every hour from 07:00 to 19:00 it adds one line per new message to the company brain: who wrote, what they want, which client, and who on the team knows them. It can only read that one mailbox: it never sends, drafts, files or changes anything, links and addresses are stripped from what it writes, and anything personal or confidential is counted for you rather than summarised. Anyone can then ask "what's in the shared inbox?".

Approve changes#

Proposed changes to policies, prices, processes, client pages and shared skills appear on the company agent's Team page, under Waiting for you, within the hour. Read the lines that change and any warnings, add a note if you like, and choose Approve or Turn down. Every assistant on the team has an approved change within the hour.

Add people#

Choose Set up a team again: your team is listed. Choose Add people, list the new names, paste the hosting token, and Add them. Nobody else's server is rebuilt. Hand the new people their assistants as above.

Someone is leaving#

Choose Someone's leaving for your team, pick the person, type their name to confirm, paste the hosting token, and choose Remove them from the team. Their personal/ folder is saved on your computer (in Crads-AI/team-exports) for you to hand back; nobody else has a copy. If their server is already gone, tick Their server is already gone to skip that step.

Support for the whole team#

Under your team, Support access for the whole team opens Crads AI support for 24 hours on the company agent only, or on every server. Every server includes your staff's assistants, so tell your team first. Close it on every server ends it early. Each grant is logged on each server, the same as granting support access on one.