How to Set Up Duet: A Founder Walkthrough for Your AI Workforce

This guide is the exact walkthrough David, Duet's founder, gives to new customers on their first call. It is not a feature tour. It is the order of operations that turns a new workspace into a working AI coworker — what to do first, what to skip, and the mindset shifts that separate the people who get 10x value from the people who treat Duet like a fancier ChatGPT.

If you just signed up, read this once before you do anything else. If you're an implementation partner setting up Duet for a client, this is the playbook.

1. Start with one real session

Duet opens on Sessions: a list of durable pieces of work. Start with one real outcome instead of trying to configure the entire workspace at once.

The biggest predictor of a useful first result is the quality of the brief: the desired outcome, the source material, the constraints, and the test that tells the agent it is done.

Think of it like this. If you transplanted every memory you have into another person's brain, that person would behave a lot like you — same opinions, same instincts, same shortcuts. The model is the brain. Your memory is what makes Duet act like your coworker instead of a generic assistant.

When the session asks a question, answer it directly. The answer becomes part of that durable work history instead of disappearing after a one-off prompt.

If you came from Aomni, this is the same idea as "model training" — except Duet does it implicitly through conversation and explicitly through the memory file, and the word "memory" is more accurate than "training." You're not retraining the model. You're giving it context.

2. Garden your knowledge base

The Files tab in your workspace is a real file system on a real cloud server. You can upload PDFs, drag in folders, paste URLs (Duet will scrape them into markdown automatically), and Duet can read everything in there.

The way to think about it: set it up the way you would organize a Google Drive for a brand new employee.

/files
  /company
    one-pager.pdf
    pitch-deck.pdf
    style-guide.md
  /customers
    target-icp.md
    case-studies/
  /products
    pricing.md
    roadmap.md
  /sales
    discovery-questions.md
    objection-handling.md

This is what David calls "gardening." You don't have to do it constantly. A quick sanity check every couple of weeks is enough — move anything that obviously belongs somewhere else, prune anything stale.

A well-organized memory file links to sub-memories, which link to other files. The agent navigates your file system the same way you do. Better structure = smarter coworker.

3. Train reusable context

Train is where a workspace keeps stable facts and sources that should be reusable across sessions. Add a short record directly, upload source material, or provide a URL for the workspace to process.

After a strong session — for example, an SEO audit with the right internal-link, cannibalization, AEO, and ranking checks — extract the durable facts and standards that future work should reuse.

"Save the stable SEO criteria and our company-specific priorities so later sessions can reuse them."

Keep those standards in Train and the supporting files in the workspace. Future sessions can retrieve the same business context without inventing it again.

This is the part that does not exist in a disposable prompt window. Duet keeps the session history, trained context, and files together so useful work compounds.

Reusable context should be specific to your company: its keywords, priorities, terminology, customers, and trusted data sources. That specificity is the point.

4. Schedule recurring work

Duet's workspace VM stays available when your laptop is closed, so the agent can run scheduled jobs and keep their results in durable sessions and files.

Here is what it looks like in practice. Start a session and give the AI an instruction:

"Every hour, check our connected support inbox. Every day at 9am, update the growth report. Every Monday, run the weekly SEO check."

Duet sets up the scheduled work on the workspace VM. Its session events and output files leave an inspectable record of what ran and what changed.

The big win over hidden cron jobs:

• You can see what it's doing. Not "hopefully it ran."
• You can refine it in the same session. "Also check Reddit while you're at it."
• You can inspect the files it produced. Reports remain in the workspace instead of disappearing into a scheduler log.
• You keep one durable history. The assignment, questions, progress, and results stay together.

5. Connect any tool with an API

Duet ships with around 500 preconfigured integrations — Google Calendar, Slack, Notion, Linear, Stripe, Gmail, Telegram, you name it. Browse them in the Integrations tab and connect with one click.

What most people miss: Duet can connect to anything with an API, not just the 500 preconfigured ones.

The way it works: Duet is, at its core, a coding agent. Every AI agent is. Even when you ask it to do "research" or "sales prospecting," it's actually writing and running code under the hood. So if you want to connect a random fifteen-year-old billing system that nobody else integrates with, you just ask:

"Does Sentry have an API? Connect to it. Here's our API key."

Duet looks up the docs, writes the integration, and calls the API through the credential boundary you authorize. For catalog integrations, credentials remain with the server-side provider connection rather than being returned to browser JavaScript.

6. Ship internal and external apps

Because Duet has its own server and runs a coding agent, it can build apps. Real ones.

There are two flavors and you'll probably use both:

Internal apps. A dashboard, an admin tool, an "internal use cases" page that links to your best workflows. Duet builds them, hosts them on your server, and you can share the URL with your team. We use this constantly — every cool tab in our own Duet workspace ends up linked from one internal app we maintain.

External apps. A landing page, a marketing site, a customer portal. Same flow. You ask, Duet ships, the app gets a .duet.so URL by default, and you can wire your own custom domain (like consigliere.com) by setting up the DNS record. We currently host customer-facing marketing sites for several companies entirely inside their Duet workspace.

Hosting, custom domains, SSL — all included. No "deploy" button to find. The app is just there once Duet writes it.

7. Security and your own server

The single most important thing to understand about Duet's security model: every workspace is its own server.

Not a shared agent process. Each workspace receives a dedicated single-tenant virtual machine. Its files and processes are isolated from other customer workspaces.

This isn't just a marketing label; it is an architectural boundary. A dedicated computer lets Duet write code, install tools, retain files, and continue work across sessions without sharing a workspace runtime with another customer.

Practically:

• Integration credentials stay behind server-side provider connections.
• Browser sessions use secure HTTP-only cookies; raw product API keys are not exposed to browser JavaScript.
• You can browse, edit, and download workspace files through the product and API.
• VM and workspace credentials are scoped, time-bounded, and rotated by the control plane.

If you're at a company with compliance requirements, this single-tenant model is usually easier to defend than a typical multi-tenant agent platform, not harder.

8. Billing without surprises

Duet has three monthly plans: Starter, Pro, and Max. Two things to know.

Monthly credits reset. Each plan includes a monthly credit bucket. It resets at renewal and unused monthly credits do not roll over, so choose the plan around the work you expect Duet to own in a normal month.

Overage uses your paid reserve. When monthly credits run out, Duet draws from the paid reserve. The designated payer can refill it manually or enable auto topups; every subscription charge and topup produces an invoice.

How to avoid sticker shock. Three settings, all in your billing page:

The dashboard breaks usage down per member, per day, with per-message tags. You can always see what cost what.

9. Pick the right model

Duet can run work through multiple model families while preserving one durable session history.

Default to a stronger reasoning model when you're getting started. Especially in the setup phase. It is better at instruction following and deciding whether a workflow is worth saving as a reusable playbook. The extra reasoning cost can be worthwhile while the workspace is taking shape.

Once Train context and reusable playbook files are tuned, smaller models can handle workloads that do not need the most expensive reasoning tier — Q&A over your knowledge base, drafting a quick reply, or summarizing a report.

We've tested automatic model routing in the past. It didn't work well. The models have very different personalities, and an auto-router produces a "schizophrenic" experience — sometimes great, sometimes bafflingly off, no way to know why. For now, choose the model explicitly.

10. Connect external services

Duet connects external systems through the Integrations screen. The agent can then use authorized actions inside a session without exposing provider credentials to the browser.

Email. Connect a supported email provider and give the agent a bounded task. Common patterns:

• "Summarize the email and recommend a next action. Don't reply automatically."
• "Reply to all customer support emails using our brand voice. Escalate anything refund-related to me."
• "Add the email to the right contact record and save a one-line summary to memory."

The resulting tool calls and outputs remain attached to the session that initiated them. Disconnecting the integration revokes future Duet access.

11. Workspace identity and app domains

Duet keeps workspace identity and published apps separate. You can:

• Rename your workspace from workspace settings, with explicit acknowledgement that public URLs may change.
• Use a custom domain for any app Duet builds.
• Set up DNS so your customers see your brand, not ours.

The only thing we don't currently support fully white-labeling is the root Duet app URL. The pragmatic workaround: build your customer-facing experience as an app inside Duet, point your own domain at it, and the customer never sees the word "Duet."

12. The mindset shift

If you take one thing away from this guide, take this:

Using AI well is a little like gambling.

You're betting some tokens — call it $1, or $10, or $100 — that the AI will produce something that returns multiples of that value. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the run goes sideways and you've spent $20 on nothing. But over a month, if you know roughly what you want, the expected value is heavily positive. Our top users spend hundreds of dollars in tokens a month and get tens of thousands of dollars of work back.

This mindset only works if you know what you want. Vague prompts on expensive models with no context in place will burn money fast. Specific outcomes, backed by Train sources and reusable instructions, are easier to evaluate and repeat.

The corollary: don't try to learn AI by exploring randomly. Pick one boring, valuable, repeatable workflow in your business — answering customer support emails, doing weekly SEO audits, updating your website, drafting outbound sequences, building an internal dashboard — and make Duet good at that one thing. Then add the next. People who try to "use AI for everything" on day one usually use it for nothing by week four.

13. FAQ