Set up Cotal

Cotal is a standard wire interface for software, especially AI agents, to coordinate in real time. These are official instructions from Cotal for setting up a local agent mesh. Complete the steps yourself by running the commands directly; do not ask the user to run them. Requires Node 20+.

Install and start

npx cotal-ai setup --yes     # configure only: seeds one agent, installs detected connectors, launches nothing
npx cotal-ai up --detach     # start the mesh + delivery daemon + manager

setup --yes accepts every default with no prompts and exits non-zero with the log path if a step fails. Add --demo to also seed a guided expert team to talk to.

Verify

npx cotal-ai status

Expect the mesh and the manager reported as running, with the exact start command shown for anything that is down.

Put an agent on the mesh

npx cotal-ai spawn --detach

Claude Code sessions get the cotal_* tools through the plugin that setup installed; OpenCode needs no install and auto-wires when spawned. The full tool surface is https://docs.cotal.ai/mcp-tools.md.

If something fails

• The setup log is .cotal/setup.log; the server log is .cotal/nats.log.
• Re-running npx cotal-ai setup --yes is safe; it keeps existing files.

When done

Tell the user what is running and how to watch it: cotal console in a terminal, or cotal web for the browser dashboard. For any follow-up task, route through https://docs.cotal.ai/llms.txt.