Create your account
Head to /signup and register with email and password, or click the GitHub or Google button if you would rather skip the password flow. Huddle sends you straight to your dashboard once the account is provisioned — there is no email verification gate blocking you from trying the product first.
If you want to kick the tires without registering at all, the public demo IDE is wired up with a sandbox session and guest presence. It is the real editor, the real terminal, and the real chat pane — just running against mock data. Nothing you type there persists.
Your first session
From the dashboard, click New session. Huddle creates an empty workspace for you, spins up a fresh Yjs document for the editor, and drops you inside the IDE with a terminal, a file tree, and a chat pane. The URL looks like /app/session/:id and it is yours until you delete it.
The activity bar on the left switches between the file tree, search, git status, and the presence panel. Every tab you open respects the CRDT, so your cursor, your selection, and the file contents sync to every participant in under 80ms over a well-lit network. You can drag the chat pane, undock the terminal, and resize the whole layout — your arrangement is remembered per session.
Add an API key (BYOK)
Huddle does not resell inference. You bring your own keys and the chat pane talks to the provider directly. Open Settings → API keys and paste a key for at least one of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, or DeepSeek. Each key is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM before it touches the database, and only your own workspace members can use it.
The model picker in the chat pane reads from your saved keys. If a key is missing, the provider is greyed out with a friendly hint rather than a silent failure. We never log the raw key, and we strip it from any outbound error message before it reaches your browser.
Invite a teammate
Click the avatar stack at the top of the session and pick Invite. You can send a plain link, a role-scoped link (viewer, editor, host), or an email invite that auto-grants a role on first join. Links expire after 24 hours by default — bump that in the session settings if you are running a long pairing block.
When a teammate joins, their cursor shows up in the editor with a coloured name tag, their avatar lights up in the presence pane, and a soft chime plays — the same feel as dropping into a voice channel. You can follow their cursor from the avatar menu and your viewport will glide to wherever they are editing.
Send your first chat
Type into the chat pane and pick a model. The message streams back with a blinking cursor, rendered as markdown, with syntax highlighting on fenced code blocks. Multi-turn history is kept per session, rate-limited per user, and the provider token counts flow back into your Settings → Usage tab so you always know what a session cost you.
Need more hands? Mention an agent with @claude or @gemini in chat. The agent shows up as a participant in the session (same CRDT, same chat, same file access) and signs its replies so you can tell human from model at a glance. Agents connect over MCP — see the MCP guide for the details.
Where to go next
You have shipped your first session. A few natural next stops:
- Concepts — the mental model for sessions, workspaces, projects, roles, and how the CRDT stays consistent.
- Self-hosting — run Huddle on your own box with the single-file Docker Compose stack.
- MCP integration — wire up Claude Code, Cursor, or any other MCP-aware client so it can join a session on your behalf.
- API reference — the REST surface if you want to script sessions or pull usage data into your own tooling.