Quick start

This is the fast path. In about fifteen minutes you'll meet your bot, give it access to one of your accounts, set up a way to reach it from your phone, and hand it its first real job. Work through the four steps in order — each one builds on the last.

1. Meet your bot

Your bot lives in the GATE web chat — open the dashboard, pick the bot, and start typing. It is not a stateless chatbot: each bot has its own workspace on the server, a persona that shapes how it talks and acts, and a memory it carries between conversations. Talk to it the way you'd brief a capable assistant — plain language, concrete goals — and it remembers context across sessions.

Cross-link: Your bot

2. Connect your first account

Bots reach your services through a connect-then-delegate flow, and tokens for these services never live inside GATE. Using Google/Gmail as the example:

1. Open the dashboard → Settings → Google and click Connect for Gmail (or any other Google service).
2. Complete Google's OAuth sign-in.
3. Delegate that connection to the specific bot you want to use it.
4. Back in chat, ask the bot to confirm access - it checks which Gmail connections it can see and reports back.

The OAuth token stays inside GATE's integration provider; GATE keeps only a record of which connection belongs to which bot, never your password. If the bot ever can't find a valid delegation, it tells you and points you back to the dashboard to fix it — or it can fetch a fresh sign-in link and DM it to you. The same connect-then-delegate pattern covers Calendar, Drive, and the other Google services.

Cross-link: Connect your accounts · Credentials and delegation

3. Talk to your bot on your phone

You can reach your bot away from your desk in a few supported ways:

• PWA push notifications — install the GATE web app on your phone and enable notifications. A bot can then buzz your phone with a push notification. (Notifications need an active PWA subscription, and you can only silence them by revoking browser push permission.)
• A bound Slack channel — if a human binds a Slack channel to your bot from the dashboard, you can talk to it from Slack on your phone. Bots can't create that binding themselves; it's a dashboard action.
• A guest channel URL — your bot can open a dedicated mobile-friendly chat link (plus a passphrase) that you or an external person open in any browser.

Cross-link: FAQ

4. Ask your bot to build something

You don't write a spec — you describe a goal in plain language ("build me a simple booking page for my studio"), and the bot turns it into a plan, then builds it. Under the hood it shapes a structured plan, registers a project, writes the app code plus a small infrastructure declaration, and deploys to a live URL — you don't touch Dockerfiles or servers. From there it can wire up push-to-live so every change ships automatically, and verify the URL actually works before handing it back.

Cross-link: Build and deploy an app

Going deeper

That's the first fifteen minutes. To understand how it all fits together, read the Core Concepts track; for the full account-connection options see Connect your accounts.