You've probably used an AI assistant before. You type a question, it answers, you type another question. Each conversation starts fresh. There's no memory of what you worked on last week, no understanding of your codebase, no accumulation of context over time.
A.L.I.C.E. is something different. It's a team of 28 specialized AI agents that work together, remember things, and get better the longer you use them. This guide will get you from zero to your first real interaction in about 10 minutes.
Let's do it.
You need two things:
That's it. No Docker, no infrastructure, no config files to hand-edit.
Open your terminal and run:
npx alice-agents@latest
The installer will ask you a few questions:
Welcome to A.L.I.C.E. — Adaptive Learning Intelligence for Coordination & Execution
? Which AI provider would you like to use?
❯ Anthropic (Claude)
OpenAI (GPT-4o)
Ollama (local)
? Enter your Anthropic API key: sk-ant-...
? Which tier would you like to start with?
❯ Starter (free)
Pro
? Where should A.L.I.C.E. store your workspace? ~/alice-workspace
Answer the prompts and the installer does the rest. It scaffolds your workspace, initializes all 28 agents with their SOUL files, and sets up the memory system. Takes about 90 seconds.
When it's done, you'll see:
✓ A.L.I.C.E. installed successfully
✓ 28 agents initialized
✓ Memory system ready
✓ OpenClaw integration configured
Your orchestrator is Olivia. Say hello:
openclaw chat olivia
Olivia is your orchestrator — the agent you talk to directly. She coordinates the other 27 specialists behind the scenes. You don't need to know who does what; just tell Olivia what you need.
openclaw chat olivia
Olivia: Hey! I'm Olivia, your AI orchestrator. I have a team of 27
specialists ready to help — engineering, research, data, security,
comms, and more. What are you working on?
You: I'm a solo developer building a SaaS app. I need help across
the board — code review, writing, research, the works.
Olivia: Perfect. I'll get to know your stack and preferences as we
work. What are you building?
You: A B2B invoicing tool for freelancers. Node.js backend,
React frontend, Postgres.
Olivia: Got it. I'm making a note of that for the team. Anytime
you need something — feature planning, code review, a blog post,
competitor research — just ask me and I'll route it to the right
specialist.
Olivia is already learning. That context about your stack just got written to her memory. The next time you ask a technical question, she'll know you're on Node and Postgres without you having to repeat yourself.
Don't start with a trivial test. Give Olivia something real. The faster you do real work, the faster the agents learn what matters to you.
Try something like this:
You: I need a security review of my authentication flow. We're using
JWT tokens stored in localStorage, bcrypt for password hashing,
and we haven't implemented rate limiting yet.
Olivia: On it. I'm looping in Selena (security specialist)
for a full review. Give me a minute.
[Selena is reviewing...]
Olivia: Selena flagged a few things:
1. **localStorage for JWTs is risky** — XSS attacks can steal
tokens. Recommend httpOnly cookies instead.
2. **Rate limiting is a priority** — brute force on your login
endpoint is a real threat. Selena recommends express-rate-limit
as a quick fix.
3. **bcrypt rounds** — what's your cost factor? Anything below 10
should be bumped up.
Want Selena to write up the implementation for the cookie migration,
or should we start with rate limiting?
That's the loop in action. You talk to Olivia, she routes to the right specialist, you get domain-expert output. You never had to know Selena existed.
Here's what makes A.L.I.C.E. different from a plain AI assistant: agents remember.
Each agent has three memory layers:
After a few real work sessions, Olivia's PLAYBOOK starts filling up. She learns that you prefer direct answers over long explanations. She knows your deploy pipeline. She remembers that you tried a particular approach last month and it didn't work.
You can inspect what an agent has learned:
cat ~/alice-workspace/workspace-olivia/PLAYBOOK.md
You can also edit these files directly. If an agent learned something wrong, fix it. The memory system is just Markdown — no black box, no magic you can't inspect.
The Starter tier gives you the full 28-agent framework, local memory, and single-user access. It's genuinely useful and free.
Upgrade to Pro when:
openclaw upgrade
That opens the browser-based upgrade flow. Takes about 2 minutes.
Don't overthink it. Here are three concrete things you can do right now to get real value out of A.L.I.C.E.:
Paste in a piece of code and ask for a review. Something you actually wrote, not a toy example. See how the engineering agents handle it.
Ask Olivia to research a competitor. Give her a specific company and ask for a feature comparison or pricing breakdown. Watch her route it to the research specialist.
Describe a decision you're wrestling with. Architecture choice, pricing model, hiring vs. contracting — give Olivia the context and ask what she thinks. You'll get a structured breakdown from the relevant specialists, not just a generic AI answer.
The agents get better the more you use them. Start with something real today and you'll feel the difference by the end of the week.
Questions? Issues? The fastest path to help is our Discord or opening an issue on GitHub. We actually read them.