Docs

Everything here is written for a person, not a developer. If a sentence needs a computer science degree, that is a bug - tell us and we will fix it.

The idea in one minute

You probably use more than one AI tool. Each lives in its own tab, terminal, or app, and none of them know about each other. Cronus puts them on one desk. Two ways to work:

Ask Cronus. Type anything into the main chat. Cronus answers small things itself, and for real work it picks the agent whose skills fit and hands the job over, telling you which one it chose.
Go direct. The dock at the bottom right shows every agent. Click one and it opens as its own window - no routing, live output.

Everything runs on your computer. Nothing leaves your machine unless you connect a cloud model on purpose.

Go deeper

Claude

The heavyweight: plans, does, and verifies the hardest multi-step work.

Hermes

The learner: it picks up your skills and your way of working, and gets better every time it runs.

OpenClaw

Arrives already skilled: a community market of thousands of abilities you import and manage like apps, reachable from the chat apps you already use.

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Memory (Hindsight)

Why your agents remember you next week, and why that memory lives on your machine.

AI words, translated

Tokens, parameters, context windows, local vs cloud - every term, in plain English.

What a week looks like

Three honest stories of Cronus doing real work: a consultant, an owner, a builder.

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Security

The threat model in plain words, including what we cannot protect you from.

Why use Cronus

The honest case, the deliberate trade-offs, and who this is NOT for.

Your first five minutes

Install and start it (see Install). The dashboard opens at localhost:8787/cronus, or in its own window if you use the desktop app.
Meet the setup wizard. It health-checks your machine: green means working, gray means not connected yet. Gray is normal on a new computer, and every gray row includes a fix hint in plain words.
Connect one brain. Chat needs at least one AI model. The free path: install Ollama, then run ollama pull qwen3:4b. Cronus lists it as "local, free" automatically.
Say something. Ask "what can you do?". The first reply on a local model is slow while the model loads - after that it gets quicker. (Why?)

How to

Talk to Cronus

The main chat (Oracle) reads your message and either answers, hands the job to ONE agent as a background task, or asks a single clarifying question. The model chip in the top bar shows which brain it is using - click it to switch.

Talk to one agent directly

Click an agent's chip in the dock. Its window opens with its own saved conversation, drags by the title bar, and streams the agent's raw output live. Green dot means installed; gray means not on this machine.

Pick your model

"Local, free" models run on your own computer through Ollama - private, offline, no cost. Claude models need your Claude plan sign-in and are faster and sharper. Cronus falls back gracefully and tells you what happened when a model is unreachable. The Local Models page downloads new local models and shows what fits your memory.

Build an automation

The Automations page turns plain words into a draft workflow for n8n, the popular open-source automation tool: describe a routine ("every Monday, pull the report and email it to me") and get a working draft to review. If n8n is running on your machine, the page appears in the sidebar automatically.

Change how it looks

The style button in the top bar reskins the whole app: font pack, accent color, sharpness, density, glow. Your desk, your look.

Common questions

Chat is slow.

You are probably on a small local model, and the first reply after a restart also loads the model into memory. Keep chatting (it warms up), pull a smaller model, or sign in to a Claude plan for fast replies.

My antivirus flagged the installer.

The prebuilt installers are not yet code-signed, and antivirus tools distrust unsigned new programs on principle. Installing from source avoids the warnings; signing is on the roadmap.

Where is my data?

In your home folder: app state in ~/artemis, background job logs in ~/.cache/prompt-studio-jobs. Delete those and the app folder, and Cronus is fully gone.

Something broke. Where do I look?

Open Setup and run the health check - it says what is working and how to fix what is not, row by row. Still stuck? Email us and paste what the health check said.