Your first chat

The quickest way to see TheYgent working is to install a small model and talk to it. This takes a few minutes once the services are up.

Before you start: the three services should be running (make status to confirm), and you should have at least one local engine installed with make engines. No local engine? You can register a remote model instead and skip straight to step 3.

1. Open the Registries page

In the left sidebar, under Configuration, open Registries. This page lists the models registered in your inference plane and is where you add new ones.

2. Install a small model

Click Add model, then Browse Hugging Face → to open the browse dialog.

1. Search for something small — for example qwen, llama, or phi.
2. Set the Size filter to Small (<3B). Small, quantized models download fastest and load quickly.
3. The Engines chips are limited to engines your machine can actually run — discovery only shows models you can execute. (If no local engine is ready, the page tells you to install one first.)
4. Expand a card to see its variants (quantizations). Each carries a fit badge sized against your machine's RAM: fits (green), tight (amber), or too large (red). Choose a variant marked recommended that fits.
5. Click Install. Pick a logical id — the short name agents and chat will use to reference this model (one is suggested for you) — then Download & install.

Or paste an id directly

In the Hugging Face tab you can paste a specific model id or URL — for example mlx-community/Qwen2.5-0.5B-Instruct-4bit — and press Add to jump straight to its variants.

Download progress appears in the notification center (bottom-right): bytes transferred, speed, an ETA, and a Cancel button. It survives navigation, so you can move on while it runs. The weights download inside your inference plane — the bytes never pass through the control plane. When it finishes, the model shows up in the Installed table with the logical id you chose.

3. Start a chat

In the sidebar, open New Chat.

1. Leave the Model / Agent toggle on Model.
2. In the searchable select, pick your model by its logical id.

4. Send a message

Type in the composer at the bottom and press Enter to send (Shift+Enter inserts a newline). Your first message lazily starts the engine — the model loads on demand, so the first reply can take a little longer than the ones after it; the engine then stays warm.

The answer streams in token by token. If you picked a reasoning ("thinking") model, its reasoning appears in a collapsible Thinking… block above the answer, which auto-collapses once the answer lands.

A few things worth knowing:

• The model is pinned once the conversation starts — use the New chat button to switch to a different model.
• Every conversation is recorded as a session. Find it again under Chats in the sidebar, or in the Recents list below the navigation.
• Each answer carries a run link that opens the full run detail with its execution trace.

Where to next

You want to…	Go to
Build an agent instead of chatting with a raw model	Your first agent
Learn everything the chat surface can do (voice, images, thinking)	Chat
Understand installing, browsing, and managing models	Installing local models
A model won't appear or a call fails	Troubleshooting