Your first day with Castellan

The welcome#

The first time Castellan's page opens, a welcome walks you through it. You can skip it at any step, and open it again any time from Settings.

1. What Castellan is. Castellan keeps your manor: the household of local agents on this PC. Each agent is an employee that holds a role, an office of the manor: one tends your drives, one keeps the gate, one brings the news you follow.
2. How the work goes. Hiring, the two kinds of agent, Needs you, and updates. The role cards are outlined on the page behind it as it talks about them.
3. Settings. Where they are: the gear in the title bar.
4. Set up local AI on this PC. See below.
5. What is this PC mostly for? and Your first hires, on a manor with nobody hired yet. See below.

Setting up local AI#

The agents' writing, naming and captions come from a small model that runs on this PC, never online. It runs on the NPU first, then the graphics card, then the processor.

The welcome's Set up local AI on this PC step looks at this PC and says what it would download, and how much. Set up local AI fetches the model servers and models from their makers, each checked against a pinned checksum. It needs no administrator, and carries on in the background while you go on with the welcome. If it stops before the end, Set up again tries the rest.

If this PC's NPU can't run the model, the step says so and why: the graphics card or the processor does the work instead. More in Where the work runs.

Hiring your first staff#

1. What is this PC mostly for? Choose Gaming, Software development or Everyday use. It's only a starting point.
2. Your first hires lists every agent Castellan can hire, each with its office, what it does, and how it works. The ones that suit how you use the PC are ticked. Change any.
3. Hire sends the ticked ones to be hired. Hiring your staff follows each one: Hiring…, Hired, or Didn't install. You can close the welcome: the hiring carries on, and each role's card shows how it goes.

Each agent is installed by its own installer, then takes up its role and goes on duty. If one couldn't be hired, its role's card says why, and its Hire tries again.

The two kinds of agent#

Each agent's card, and its entry when you hire it, says which kind it is:

Nothing that changes your files or your PC happens without your say-so: an agent that works on its own still only does what you've allowed it to.

Each new hire's tour#

A new hire's page has a short tour: what it does, the few settings only you can give it, and a walk round its page. Castellan offers it once the agent is in: Take the tour, on its card.

Some agents can't start without a setting only you can give: the Chamberlain needs a mail account, the Developer Herald something to follow. Until it's filled in, the agent's card says Waiting for its settings, and Fill them in opens its tour at that step.

Where to go next#

• Castellan's page: everything on it, and what it tells you at a glance.
• Hiring, switching and letting staff go, whenever you change your mind.
• Updates: they're off until you switch them on.