Your first five minutes

From downloading DAVE to watching six AI employees finish a real job — on your own computer, with the AI key you already have.

Windows 10 and 11 · about 5 minutes · your own key, your own bill

1 · Install it

2 · The Windows warning

If your antivirus flags it as well, that is a false positive — apps packaged with PyInstaller trigger it sometimes. You are welcome to upload the installer to VirusTotal before running it.

3 · Connect your key

DAVE does not sell you tokens and never marks them up. It uses the AI provider you already pay for, with your own key, so whatever a job costs goes straight to them at their price. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini all work, as does a model running on this machine through Ollama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Already have a key? Skip to setting up the office and paste it in. The steps below are for a Gemini key, which is the quickest one to create if you do not have anything yet.

4 · Set up the office

Open DAVE from the Start menu. Four short screens:

The doors open and six people walk to their desks: Kartik researches, Jainish builds, Priya checks, Vasu reviews, Puja remembers, Kajal learns.

5 · Your first task

In the box on the right, type something real but small. For example:

Build a one-page website for a small bakery called Rise & Crumb.
Include the opening hours and a contact number in the footer.

Press send, then watch the floor. This is the part other tools do not show you:

• Kartik gathers what the page needs
• He walks the findings to Jainish, who writes the actual file
• Priya checks it against what you asked for, point by point
• Vasu scores it and says what is still wrong
• If it falls short, it goes back to Jainish automatically — you never see the first draft
• Puja keeps the one thing worth remembering for next time

When it finishes, Windows tells you, even if DAVE is minimised. The file is in the agent's folder and you can open it.

6 · Give it your own rule

This is the part that makes DAVE different, and it is worth ten minutes of your first day.

An AI reviewer gives an opinion. Your own rule gives a verdict — the same one, every time, for free, with no tokens spent. Open your roles, make a new one, and paste:

def check(request, work):
    """Every page we ship has a footer with a phone number in it."""
    if "<footer" not in work.lower():
        return False, "no footer element in the page"
    if not any(ch.isdigit() for ch in work):
        return False, "the footer has no phone number"
    return True, "footer and contact number present"

From now on every page the office builds is checked against that before it reaches you. If your code has a mistake, the job carries on and tells you — your rule can never stop the office.

When it goes wrong