Installing

Download the installer from the download page and run it. Windows will warn you that the publisher is unknown, because SIN is not yet code-signed — choose More info, then Run anyway. If you would rather check the file first, the download page publishes its SHA-256, and Get-FileHash will tell you whether you have the one we published.

SIN installs into your user folder. It does not install services or drivers, and it does not start with Windows.

Local AI and Ollama

SIN does not contain a language model. It talks to one served by Ollama, a separate free program that runs on your machine. This is deliberate: models are several gigabytes each, they are updated on their own schedule, and if you already run Ollama, SIN should use yours rather than install a second copy.

Install Ollama from its own website. After that you should not need a terminal again — SIN detects whether Ollama is installed and whether it is running, and starts it for you when it is not. Starting it opens no console window, and SIN confirms the runtime actually answered before telling you it worked.

Models

Open Models to see what is installed, install more, and remove ones you do not want. Downloads show real progress and can be cancelled.

SIN expects qwen3:14b for reasoning and qwen2.5vl:7b for looking at your screen. A 14-billion-parameter model needs roughly 9 GB of memory to run comfortably; if your machine has less, a smaller model will be faster and will not run out of memory. You can change which model SIN uses in System.

First run

Five steps: a welcome, a check that your machine can run SIN, your name, the agent's name, and a real question answered by the real model. The last step matters — you finish setup knowing SIN works, rather than hoping. You can skip out of it at any screen, and it will not reappear.

Talking to SIN

Type in the SIN tab. The conversation persists while you move around the application — go to Home, the Office, System, and come back, and it is still there.

When SIN wants to do something to your computer it proposes it and waits. You approve or refuse. If SIN cannot do something it says so plainly instead of producing a plausible answer.

Quick, Normal, Deep, Auto

How hard SIN thinks about a single message. Measured on a desktop with a 14B model:

• Quick — deliberation off. About 2 seconds. The reply is roughly as long as Normal's; it just does not think first.
• Normal — the model's own behaviour. About 10 seconds.
• Deep — more reasoning, double the budget. About 15 seconds, with roughly 55% more thinking than Normal.
• Auto — chooses based on how much room the turn has.

Quick is genuinely five times faster and is the right default for ordinary questions. Use Deep when the answer depends on the reasoning rather than on recall.

Tasks and reminders

Create reminders from the sidebar, or from conversation — “remind me to call Mum at six” produces a proposal showing the time SIN understood, which you confirm. It is deliberately not set automatically: a reminder that fires at the wrong hour is worse than one you had to press a button for.

Recurring reminders fire on a real clock and survive restarting SIN. Restarting never re-fires something that already fired. Fired reminders land in the Inbox rather than appearing once and vanishing.

Workflows

A workflow is an ordered list of steps you build on the Workflows screen and run by pressing Run. There are two kinds of step: a note, which reports a message and has no side effect, and create a reminder, which goes through the same one-shot path the Reminders screen uses. A workflow may have up to twenty steps, and each step carries its own timeout.

A run stops at the first step that fails or times out. The steps after it are marked skipped rather than attempted, and the run counts as succeeded only if every step did. You can cancel one mid-run, which marks the rest cancelled — a different outcome from skipped, and the run's own history keeps them apart so it can say what stopped it.

A workflow can be scheduled. On the Reminders screen, pick a workflow instead of an agent, and at that time SIN runs it itself. That is not what a scheduled task for an agent does — that one only adds the task to the list and waits for you to step the team in the Office. The form tells you which of the two you are creating as you fill it in, because the difference decides whether you are waiting for something. Runs that finish are filed in History.

A step that would need your approval is refused — when the workflow is saved, and again if it runs. Nothing in this build has a step like that. The refusal exists so that the first one that does cannot run unapproved.

Memory

SIN keeps what it learns about the things you discuss, scoped per agent, in a database on your disk. You can read it and delete from it. Nothing is uploaded.

Agents and teams

Every agent you create is given a generated name and a personality made of twelve bounded traits. The name is stable and reproducible from the agent's identity, so it will not drift.

Personality never grants permission. A bold agent is not allowed to do more than a cautious one; personality changes how an agent writes and nothing else. Capabilities are granted separately and explicitly, and every grant and revocation is recorded with a timestamp.

The Office

A room you arrange: furniture, zones, workstations, and agents assigned to them. It persists between sessions. An agent with nothing to do is shown as idle — SIN does not animate activity it cannot evidence.

The overlay

A small card that sits over whatever you are doing: a separate transparent window with no border and no taskbar entry, kept above other windows, which in every mode but one lets clicks pass straight through to the program underneath and never takes focus away from it. It shows which mode it is in, and it mirrors a reply SIN is already writing in the main window, so you can see whether an answer has finished without alt-tabbing back to it. There is no text box in the overlay — it is a readout, not a second place to type.

Ctrl+Alt+S summons it, and the same combination puts it away again. The binding is registered with Windows rather than with the SIN window, so it works when SIN is not the program you are looking at. It needs modifiers by design: a system-wide binding on a bare key would fire while a game was reading that same key, which is why the default is three keys and not one. Show Overlay on the tray menu reaches the same place.

The modes, and what each one means:

• Normal — not on screen at all. The main SIN window is unaffected either way; this is only about the overlay.
• Overlay — shown, click-through, does not take focus. Where summoning it lands.
• Interactive — shown, and accepting mouse and keyboard. The only mode SIN may take focus in, because it is the only one you asked for directly. Dragging the card somewhere else happens here, since every other mode is click-through and a click cannot land on it.
• Click-through — the explicit way back from Interactive to that same quiet posture.
• Game Mode — click-through, reduced motion, and no GPU-heavy work started on the overlay's own initiative. While it is on, an automatic request to become Interactive is refused; you asking for it yourself is the one thing that overrides that.
• Transparent Screen — the same click-through posture, but the window covers the whole primary monitor instead of a small card. Leaving it restores the size and position the card actually had, not a default.

Where you drag the overlay is remembered between restarts. A saved position that is not a plausible screen coordinate — from a monitor you have since unplugged, say — is ignored rather than used to put the window somewhere you cannot reach it.

Closing the window

Closing the main window hides it. It does not quit SIN. The overlay stays available, the global hotkey keeps working, and anything on the clock — reminders, and workflows you have scheduled — keeps running with no window open.

SIN puts an icon by the clock. Clicking it brings the window back; its menu has Open SIN, Show Overlay and Quit SIN. Quit is the only one that actually ends the program — every other way of dismissing SIN puts it away instead.

SIN does not start with Windows, so nothing scheduled fires while it is closed.

Screen capture

Sight is in System → Sight: which agents may look at this screen, and for how long. A grant can expire or stand until you revoke it, revoking is one click and never asks for confirmation, and while any grant stands the indicator in the sidebar says so — it reports that an agent may look, not only that one is looking this second, because those are the same risk to you.

You choose what “the screen” means. The same panel lists every monitor and every visible window, the way a streaming tool lets you pick a source, and you pick one. It is a single machine-wide choice rather than one per agent, because what you are willing to have looked at does not change depending on who is asking. Choose nothing and it is the primary display.

And what it may never see. Under Never capture you keep rules matched against a window's process name or its title — ordinary case-insensitive text, not a pattern language, so nothing depends on knowing what a special character does. A fresh install starts with password managers, Windows' own security and credential prompts, private and incognito browser windows, and a couple of desktop finance applications already refused. If you clear the list, SIN does not silently seed it again.

The rules are checked on every single capture, against the window that is really there, and never cached — a grant made an hour ago does not make a blocked window safe to photograph now. A window a rule would refuse is shown in the source list as blocked and cannot be picked, and a window SIN cannot identify at all, with neither a process name nor a title, is refused rather than allowed by omission.

Your desktop on your phone

A paired phone can see this desktop, from the Screen tab in the phone app. It is a pull, not a stream: the phone asks for one still frame at a time, so nothing keeps sending once you leave the tab and there is no session left running in the background. Every frame carries the moment it was taken, and a phone that goes offline says the picture is old rather than leaving the last one sitting there looking current.

Two separate permissions have to be true for a frame to exist, and both are checked again on every frame:

• the phone needs VIEW_SCREEN, granted per device under System → Mobile devices. It is deliberately its own permission and is never implied by letting a phone ask SIN what is on screen — a description is written by a model that was asked a question, and a picture is not.
• this desktop needs its own sight grant, under System → Sight, exactly as it does when you ask SIN to look at the screen yourself.

Revoke either one and frames stop. Whatever you chose as the capture source is what the phone sees — one window if that is what you picked, not silently the whole desktop — and the never-capture list applies there too, so a window you have blocked stays blocked. Frames are scaled down before they are sent, and the screenshot file is deleted from disk immediately afterwards.

Viewing is not control. There is no input injection anywhere in SIN: nothing in it can move your pointer or type for you, and a test exists whose only job is to fail if that ever stops being true.

Appearance

Themes, colours, density and typographic scale. Colours are applied through semantic tokens rather than per-component values, so a custom theme cannot leave one panel unreadable.

Character

Character Studio controls how SIN looks and how it writes: appearance, expressions, tone, verbosity, directness, and how much initiative it takes.

System

Runtime health, models, agents, performance and diagnostics. Detail opens in its own window rather than expanding the page.

Plan

System → Plan says what this copy of SIN costs. It is free: nothing in the application is locked, limited or counted, and there is no account, no licence check and no billing anywhere in the build — so that card is not reporting a plan it looked up, it is telling you there is nothing to look up.

Its one button opens the pricing page here. Prices live on the website rather than inside the application so that they can change without every installed copy needing an update to hear about it.

Updates

SIN checks for a new version at most once every six hours, and on startup if that long has passed. When one exists you are shown what changed and asked. Nothing is installed until its signature has been verified against a key built into SIN; a file that fails verification is discarded, not installed.

SIN will not install an update while a game is running, while it is answering, or while a download is in progress. Pressing Install yourself overrides the game check — it will still wait for an answer or a download to finish, because restarting would destroy work already done.

SIN never installs an older version over a newer one, and never changes your release channel without telling you. Automatic checking can be switched off in Settings; checking manually still works when it is off.

Troubleshooting

SIN says the local engine is unavailable. Ollama is not running. Open System and press Start — SIN will start it and tell you whether it worked. If that fails, SIN names the specific reason: not installed, running at a different address, or the port is taken by something else.

It says Ollama is running but not answering. Ollama is on a different address than SIN expects. Change the runtime endpoint in System. SIN only accepts addresses on your own computer.

Something else is using the port. SIN measured that rather than guessed it, and deliberately did not start a second server that would fail to bind. Stop the other program or move SIN to the address Ollama is really on.

Answers are slow. The first answer after starting pays for loading the model — about 7.5 seconds for a 14B model, once. Try Quick mode, or a smaller model if your machine is short of memory.

SIN did not start at all. It writes a startup log to its folder in your Windows application data, even when it fails before showing a window. That file is what to send us.

As a last resort, ollama serve in a terminal starts the runtime by hand. If you need it, something SIN should have handled did not — please tell us.

FAQ

Do I need an account? No. SIN has no login and no user identity.

Does it work offline? Yes, once Ollama and a model are installed. Update checks and web search need a connection; nothing else does.

Is it free? Yes, all of it. See pricing for how we think about that changing.

macOS or Linux? Not yet, and not soon. See the roadmap.

Where is my data? In a database in your Windows application data folder. See privacy.

Will an update lose my agents and settings? No. Data is migrated forward, and SIN refuses to open a database written by a newer version rather than risk damaging it.