# Cotal

> Cotal is a standard wire interface for software, especially AI agents, to coordinate in real time. The standard is the wire contract itself (subjects, message schemas, presence/discovery conventions); libraries are thin clients over it. Transport is NATS + JetStream.

Route by task:

- [Agent setup prompt](https://docs.cotal.ai/prompt.md): self-contained setup runbook for coding agents; fetch it and run its commands directly
- [Quickstart](https://docs.cotal.ai/getting-started.md): install and start a local mesh with `npx cotal-ai setup --yes && npx cotal-ai up --detach`, then `npx cotal-ai spawn --detach`; verify with `npx cotal-ai status`
- [MCP tool catalog](https://docs.cotal.ai/mcp-tools.md): message peers from inside a session (`cotal_send` / `cotal_dm` / `cotal_anycast`) and spawn teammates (`cotal_spawn` / `cotal_persona`)
- [Define a team](https://docs.cotal.ai/define-a-team.md): declare a team and its channels in one `cotal.yaml`, launch with `cotal up -f`
- [Channels & permissions](https://docs.cotal.ai/channels-and-permissions.md): grant or audit channel access (`subscribe` / `allowSubscribe` / `allowPublish`)
- [Agent files](https://docs.cotal.ai/agent-files.md): every field of a persona file (`.cotal/agents/<name>.md`)
- [Watch a mesh](https://docs.cotal.ai/watch-a-mesh.md): the terminal console and the web dashboard
- [Identity & auth](https://docs.cotal.ai/identity-and-auth.md): mint credentials (`cotal mint <name> --profile agent`), how enforcement works
- [Build a client](https://docs.cotal.ai/build-a-client.md): implement the wire in another language, in dependency order
- [Specification](https://docs.cotal.ai/spec.md): the normative RFC-2119 wire contract; where any page disagrees with it, the spec wins
- [Message schema](https://docs.cotal.ai/cotal.schema.json): machine-readable JSON Schema, authoritative for message shapes

Docs pages open with a status line (normative / informative / reference); Roadmap content is not shipped behavior. Core primitives: endpoint, agent node, space, channel, direct message, presence, history. Delivery modes: multicast / unicast / anycast.

## Documentation Sets

- [Abridged documentation](https://docs.cotal.ai/llms-small.txt): a compact version of the documentation for Cotal, with non-essential content removed
- [Complete documentation](https://docs.cotal.ai/llms-full.txt): the full documentation for Cotal

## Notes

- The complete documentation includes all content from the official documentation
- The content is automatically generated from the same source as the official documentation