BEAM Quick Start

Read-and-do time: about fifteen minutes

BEAM is a terminal-first workspace where tasks, documents, messages, and AI live in one encrypted substrate. This guide gets you working in it.

You'll need an invite code, a modern browser, and about fifteen minutes.

We'll move in seven short steps: signing in, encrypting your workspace, making a project, adding tasks, running your first AI query, finding what to do today, and pointers to the rest of the docs. The example throughline is preparing for a talk you're giving next Tuesday. Substitute your own work as you go.

1. Sign in

Open usebeam.sh. You'll see an invite gate.

Paste your invite code into the field labeled XXXXXX and hit return. If you don't have a code yet, the page has a signup field — your code will arrive by email when the next wave opens.

Once you're past the gate, sign in with email and password or with Google SSO. Either works. BEAM holds your session, so you won't redo this every visit.

2. Encrypt your workspace

After sign-in, BEAM walks you through encryption setup. You can skip it. Don't.

Choose a password — at least eight characters, longer is better. Confirm it. BEAM will then show you a 24-word recovery phrase.

Write the recovery phrase down somewhere you can find again. A password manager works. A piece of paper in a drawer works. A photo of your screen does not work — phones get lost, drives get encrypted by ransomware, screenshots end up in cloud backups you forgot about.

When you confirm I have saved my recovery phrase, BEAM continues to project setup.

Why this matters. BEAM uses AES-256-GCM with your password as the key. Your data is encrypted on your device before anything reaches the server. The server cannot read your tasks or documents even if it wanted to. The tradeoff: if you lose both the password and the recovery phrase, your data is unrecoverable. That irreversibility is the thing that makes the privacy real. For the longer architectural argument, see Concepts: Encryption.

3. Make a project

BEAM organizes work into projects containing lists containing tasks. The setup screen shows three suggestion chips — Work, Personal, Side Project — and an input.

Either click a chip or type the name of a project you'd actually use. For this guide, I'll use Tuesday talk and you can substitute your own throughout.

>Tuesday talk

Click Continue. You're in BEAM.

The terminal at the bottom of the screen is where you'll do most of your work from here. You can click around in the panels, but the terminal is faster once you know it.

4. Add some tasks

The basic verb is add. Try this:

>add Finish slide deck by Friday !high

Hit return. BEAM parses the sentence and creates a task with a due date of this Friday and a priority of high.

A few more, to see what BEAM does with natural language:

>add Review last cohort's feedback
>add Send confirmation to AV team tomorrow
>add Outline three opening anecdotes

Now you have four tasks. To see them all:

>tasks

To mark one complete, use done with a fragment of the task name (or its ID):

>done feedback

To edit a task:

>edit AV team due thursday

To create or open a list:

>list Slide work

If the list doesn't exist yet, BEAM creates it. If it does, BEAM opens it.

To pin a task as your active focus:

>work outline anecdotes

That task becomes your active task. BEAM uses this signal in the daily brief and in suggestions.

The full set of task verbs lives in Reference. The seven above — add, tasks, done, edit, move, list, work — get you most of the way day to day.

5. Your first AI query

BEAM ships with three frontier AI models — Claude, GPT, and Gemini — configured out of the box on every Wave 1 account. You query them with ask or council.

ask sends your question to a single model (your active provider, set to Claude by default):

>ask What are three angles I haven't considered for a 30-minute talk on the Tuesday topic?

You'll get one response, in the terminal output area.

council sends the same question to all three models in parallel and shows the responses side by side:

>council What are three angles I haven't considered for a 30-minute talk on the Tuesday topic?

You'll see Claude's answer, GPT's answer, and Gemini's answer rendered in three panes. Where they agree, you have something solid. Where they disagree, you have a decision to make.

The rule of thumb: ask for fast and routine. council for when the answer matters and you want to see the seam between models.

There are two other multi-model modes — debate (where models critique each other across rounds) and wild (where they take on different roles like strategist, planner, brainstormer). Skip those for now. Concepts: Council vs Debate vs Wild explains when each is right.

A response you want to keep can be saved as a document:

>council --save What should the closing five minutes of the talk feel like?

The synthesis lives in your project's docs from then on.

6. The daily rhythm

BEAM has a small set of commands for navigating your day. Learn these four and you have the loop.

brief shows your daily summary card — a snapshot of what's due, what's overdue, what's in progress, and what BEAM thinks deserves your attention first:

>brief

today shows tasks due today:

>today

now shows the single highest-priority task right now:

>now

queue shows your priority-ranked list across all projects:

>queue

Run brief in the morning. Run now when you've finished something and want to know what's next. Run queue when you want a wider view.

When you want to see what BEAM can do beyond this guide:

>help

The help output is the full command surface — every verb, every alias, organized by category. Reference covers the same ground in browsable form.

When something feels wrong, off, or just bad:

>feedback

That goes directly to the team.

7. Where to go from here

You now have a project, a list of tasks, a working AI query loop, and a daily rhythm. The rest of BEAM is additive on top of those primitives.

Two more things worth knowing on day one. Cmd+K opens Spotlight — fast search-and-ask from anywhere, read-only by design (Concepts: Spotlight vs Terminal explains the split). And if you're on a Mac, there's a desktop app — signed and notarized, downloadable from the home page at usebeam.sh. Use one BEAM window at a time for editing; running the desktop app and a browser tab side by side can make simultaneous edits fight.

When you're ready to go deeper:

• Concepts: Encryption — the architectural argument for why BEAM cannot read your work, including the honest gaps.
• Concepts: Council vs Debate vs Wild — when to reach for each multi-model mode.
• Concepts: Tasks vs Docs vs Memory — the three places work persists, and how they relate.
• Concepts: Spotlight vs Terminal — the two input surfaces and what each is for.
• Reference — every command, every flag, every setting. Browse when you're looking for something specific; skim once just to see what's there.

These docs also live inside BEAM: help quickstart renders this guide in the terminal, help <command> renders any Reference entry.

Welcome in.