Installation & Setup
Install Daintree, set up your AI agents, and open your first folder in a review-first workspace.
What is Daintree?
Daintree is a free, open-source desktop application that hosts AI coding agents in a review-first workspace. Agents run as CLI processes inside panels you watch live. When the folder you opened is a Git repository, each task can also run in its own isolated worktree on its own branch, so several agents work in parallel without editing each other's working copy. Review Hub is where you inspect, stage, and commit what they produced before any of it goes upstream. You delegate the work, watch it run, and check the result before it merges.
If you already run agents from the command line, the model maps onto what you do today:
| Terminal workflow | Daintree equivalent |
|---|---|
| Run an agent in your terminal | Launch an agent panel |
| Cut a new branch per task | Create a worktree |
Run git diff to review changes | Inspect the diff in Review Hub |
| Juggle multiple terminals | Run worktrees in parallel |
| Check which of your agents is still waiting on you | Open Pilot (Option-Command-O Control-Alt-O Control-Alt-O ) |
The path from nothing to two agents running
Four steps, in order. Each one is a page of its own, so you can stop after any of them and come back. Nothing here has to be done in one sitting.
- Install Daintree. System requirements, the download for your platform, the Git check, and the agent CLIs Daintree launches. Roughly ten minutes, most of it waiting on package managers.
- First launch. The welcome screen, the six-step setup wizard, and the getting-started checklist that tracks what you have done.
- Open your first project.
Opening a folder, what changes when it is a Git repository and what still works when it is
not, plus the other ways in: your file manager, or
daintreeon the command line. - Run your first parallel task. Two worktrees, two agents, one review. This is what Daintree exists for, and it is worth doing once deliberately before you rely on it.
If you would rather understand it first
What Is a Habitat? explains the model behind all of this without asking you to install anything: why agents get their own branches, what "review-first" commits you to, and how the pieces relate. It is the better first page if you are still deciding whether Daintree fits how you work.
If something goes wrong
Troubleshooting is organized by symptom rather than by feature, so you can start from what you are seeing. The first-run problems that come up most often are each covered on the step that introduces them: Daintree not detecting Git, an agent CLI it cannot find, a folder that is not a repository.