# beafk on your Mac

> Download the app, sign in, press Set up this Mac — and the machine is the computer you are sitting at. Nothing to paste, no admin password, and no network to join.

Two presses, and neither of them costs anything.

The Mac app is the free plan, [Local](https://beafk.app/docs/local.md), with an installer around
it. It turns the Mac in front of you into a beafk machine: the agents run
here, in your own home directory, on the AI subscriptions you already pay
for. There is no card, and nothing on this page asks you to open a terminal.

Have ready: a Mac on macOS — Apple silicon or Intel — and at least one agent
CLI you have a subscription for. That is the list;
[what you need](https://beafk.app/docs/what-you-need.md) is it in full, plan by plan.

## 1. Download it

[Get beafk for Mac](https://beafk.app/download/mac). It is a `.dmg`: open it, drag beafk to
Applications, and open beafk from there.

## 2. Sign in

The app's first screen is sign-in, and it is the same beafk account the
rest of this documentation means — the one that knows which machines are
yours. One press, no card, and nothing is quoted at you: the free plan has
nothing at the payment processor to charge. See
[signing in to beafk](https://beafk.app/docs/signing-in-to-beafk.md) for the ways in.

Down the left of the window is the map of what is being asked of you, and it
is two rows: **Sign in**, then **Set up this Mac**. Under them, the whole of
what this app says about money — *free · nothing to type · no card*.

## 3. Set up this Mac

Before it offers you anything, the app looks at the Mac it is running on: it
asks the beafk on this computer who it is, and asks your workspace whether it
knows that name. What it found is the headline, and there are four of them:

- **This Mac isn't a machine yet.** The ordinary one. Press **Set up this
  Mac**.
- **This Mac is already yours.** beafk is here and answers to your workspace.
  Nothing to install; the button opens it.
- **beafk is here, and belongs to nobody.** Somebody installed it and never
  connected it. It only has to be told whose it is — seconds.
- **This Mac belongs to somebody else**, named. A machine belongs to one
  workspace at a time. Moving it here ends every session that workspace has on
  it, and their people lose access [within the
  hour](https://beafk.app/docs/reaching-your-machine.md#cutting-somebody-off-takes-up-to-an-hour).

There is a way out of all of them — *Not now — I only want to open my other
machines* — and it is a real one: the app is a window onto a fleet as well as
a way to join one. Skipping leaves this Mac on your list as a row that is not
set up, and the offer stays one press away.

### What it does while you watch

A sentence and a bar, and the sentence is the step in hand:

1. **Putting beafk on this Mac** — the binary, out of the app's own bundle.
2. **Starting it up** — a launchd agent that runs as you, listening on
   loopback and nowhere else.
3. **Filing it under your name** — the machine joins your workspace.
4. **Fetching the tools it needs** — the packages a machine wants before an
   agent can work in a repository.
5. **Giving it a name of its own** — the fingerprint, which is how the
   [access log](https://beafk.app/docs/the-access-log.md) and every screen after this refer to it.

Minutes, not an afternoon. If it goes quiet for a few of them the screen says
so on the step it stopped at, rather than leaving a bar to imply progress.

When it is done you are in the panel, on this machine. Not a receipt and not a
list to pick from — you have one machine and you have just watched it install
itself.

## What you were not asked for

Each of these is a real difference from
[the walk on a rented box](https://beafk.app/docs/your-first-machine.md), and each one is missing
here because the panel and the machine are the same computer.

- **No terminal.** The app unpacks the binary and loads the agent itself.
- **No connect code.** The eight characters exist to carry a workspace from a
  browser to a machine somewhere else. Here there is one computer, so the app
  mints the code and spends it in the same second; it never reaches a screen.
- **No admin password.** The macOS install is root-free: the binary lives in
  your home directory and the launchd agent is a user agent.
- **No Tailscale, and no network to join.** Your browser and the node are on
  one machine, so the app talks to `127.0.0.1` with a key it keeps in your
  Keychain. Tailscale is what a *phone* needs to reach this Mac from
  elsewhere, which is [afk](https://beafk.app/docs/plans.md) — not this page.
- **No VPS.** The machine is the laptop.

## Then what

[Sign an agent in](https://beafk.app/docs/signing-an-agent-in.md) — Claude, GPT, Grok or Kimi, as
yourself, on the plan you already have with its maker — pick a folder, and
[say something to it](https://beafk.app/docs/a-chat.md).

[Local](https://beafk.app/docs/local.md) is the whole of what this free machine does and does not
do, including the two things that are not on it. When you want this Mac in
your pocket, or a machine that is not your laptop, that is
[plans](https://beafk.app/docs/plans.md).

> [!NOTE]
> A free machine is opened from that Mac and nowhere else. That is not a
> feature held back with a flag — reaching a machine you are not sitting at is
> the thing afk is, and it is the difference the price is for. See
> [how your phone reaches it](https://beafk.app/docs/reaching-your-machine.md).

---

beafk documentation · Your Mac · https://beafk.app/docs/beafk-on-your-mac

In this section:
- beafk on your Mac — https://beafk.app/docs/beafk-on-your-mac.md (this page)
- Local — https://beafk.app/docs/local.md
- Signing an agent in — https://beafk.app/docs/signing-an-agent-in.md
- A chat — https://beafk.app/docs/a-chat.md

Every page, one line each: https://beafk.app/docs/llms.txt
All of it in one file: https://beafk.app/docs/llms-full.txt