Hamlet

Your first hamlet

Give Hamlet a model, say one thing to the mayor, and watch a hamlet grow.

A new hamlet has one resident, the mayor. This page takes you from an empty common to a hamlet with a few agents in it.

Give it a model

Hamlet does not come with a model. It talks to any endpoint that speaks the OpenAI API, and you choose which.

  • A local model. Out of the box Hamlet looks for Ollama on your machine, as the endpoint local, with the model qwen3.6:35b-a3b. Install Ollama, pull that model, and there is nothing to set.
  • A hosted model. Open Settings, add the endpoint and its API key, and choose the default model. The key is kept in your system’s keychain, not in a file.

A model is written endpoint::model, so one served by an endpoint you named work is work::some-model.

Say something to the mayor

Open Hamlet. The world is in the middle, with the mayor’s house on its common. The line under the world says who it sends to. With nothing else selected, that is the mayor.

Type what you want, in plain words, and press Enter:

build me a research team

The mayor starts with a sandboxed shell, a file editor, a notes file and a folder of skills. For a job that needs more hands it creates other agents. Each one gets a house of its own, and a road to the mayor.

Watch it work

  • A robot stands at each house. While its agent works, it works in its yard.
  • Click a house or a robot to select that agent. Its talk and its notes open at the side.
  • If an agent wants something that reaches past its sandbox, it stops and asks. The request waits for you, and nothing happens until you answer. Answering what waits for you covers that.

Try things safely

Everything Hamlet keeps is in one folder, ~/.hamlet. To try things out without touching your real notes, skills and logs, start Hamlet with HAMLET_HOME set to a scratch folder:

HAMLET_HOME=~/hamlet-scratch hamlet

Next

Finding your way round explains the window and how to move through the world.