What is Zero

Zero is a desktop workspace for working on a project together with an AI model — writing, organizing files, generating media, and automating the repetitive parts.

It runs on your machine. There is no account, no sync, and no server: your project is a folder on your own disk, and everything in it stays there.

Your project is a folder

Zero does not keep a database of your work somewhere else. A project is an ordinary directory — the one you already have your files in — that Zero has marked as its own by adding a hidden .zero/ folder inside it, the same arrangement git uses.

That has a few consequences worth knowing up front:

• Your files stay yours. Text files, images, and everything else keep their names and their places in the folder tree. You can open them in another editor while Zero is running; it notices the change and updates.
• The project is versionable. Zero's own data is plain files inside .zero/, so a project can live in a git repository along with everything else you keep there — your agents, workflows, chat templates, and project settings are text and diff like text.
• Moving a project is copying a folder. There is nothing else to migrate.

One project at a time

Zero opens a single project and works inside it, the way a DAW opens one song or a 3D editor opens one scene. There is no dashboard listing all your projects and no switching between two at once — you open one, work, and open another when you need to. Recently opened projects are remembered so getting back is quick.

What you can do in it

• Talk to a model in the context of your project — chats with full history, saved system prompts, reusable chat templates, and a chat that can be attached to the document you are looking at.
• Work with your files — browse the workspace, edit text in the built-in editor, preview Markdown and CSV, and attach external folders as read-only reference material.
• Give work to an agent — the Assistant panel runs chats with an agent that has instructions and a set of tools you grant it.
• Describe structured data — objects, and schemas that do more than validate them: a schema carries an icon and a colour, buttons that run workflows, and a page layout of its own, so a type you define comes with its own small interface.
• Automate repetition — workflows run the same sequence of steps over many inputs in the background, with a spending limit you set.
• Generate media — connect image, video, and speech services and keep the results in the project as ordinary files.

What lives where

Two kinds of things, kept apart on purpose:

API keys belong to you, not to a project. Connect a provider once and every project you open afterwards can use it — and a project you share or push to git never carries your keys with it.

Next

Install Zero and open your first project, then connect a model. Until a model is connected, the chats, the Assistant, and any workflow step that calls a model have nothing to talk to, so that page comes before the tour of the interface.