What is Ergod, and how do you use it for the first time?
Ask for one small thing. Open it. Change it. Ergod is an AI agent you talk to in plain English — in Discord, Telegram or a browser tab — that does the work on its own computer and hands you back a real file. Here is what that looks like.
- REQUESTBuild a sales explorer from a six-row CSV, with a chart and filters.
- RESULTErgod returns an HTML file you can open and use.
- CHANGEAdd a paid-only shortcut and export just the visible rows.
- CHECKWe found a stuck filter, asked for a fix, and tested the corrected file shown here.
Open the result, try the controls, then ask for the next change. See the requests and all three versions →
Three steps to your first thing.
Pick a door
Open the dashboard in your browser and sign in with Discord, GitHub or Google — this is the shortest path and needs nothing installed. Or join our Discord server and use it there alongside other people.
Ask for one small thing
Not your big idea — something you can check in a glance. "Make me a page that says happy birthday with confetti" is a perfect first request. You are learning what it does, and small things teach that fastest.
Then change it
Reply with "make the confetti gold" or "add my name". Watching it edit something that already exists is the moment it clicks for most people, and it is where the real usefulness lives.
That’s enough to begin.
If you want to add Ergod to a Discord server you run, the install guide covers that — and if you don't run one, you can still add it to your own Discord account: its commands then work in every server you're in. If you would like to know how it works underneath, the guide to Discord AI agents is the next step up in detail, and the technical breakdown is the deep end.
What you do, and what you see.
A walk through the first session as it actually runs today. Do it in a browser tab, in a DM to the bot, or in a server channel; the words on the screen are the ones below.
/usage. It shows how much of your usage is used and how much remains, and when it returns./memory list shows what it kept and lets you change it.What is it?
Ergod is a helper you talk to by typing a message, the same way you would text a friend. You tell it what you want in ordinary words. It goes away, does the work on its own computer, and comes back with the finished thing — an actual file you can open, not instructions telling you how to make it yourself.
You talk to it inside Discord, a free chat app a lot of groups and friends already use, in Telegram, or in an ordinary browser tab if you would rather not. All three are the same helper working on the same files, so you can start in one and carry on in another.
How is this different from asking a chatbot?
You may have tried something like ChatGPT. You ask a question, it writes you an answer. That is genuinely useful, and for a lot of things it is all you need.
The difference is what you are left holding at the end. Say you ask for a website for your bakery:
The industry word for the second kind is an agent. It just means "software that is allowed to take steps on its own to finish a job", instead of only answering and stopping. That is the whole idea. Every other bit of jargon on this site is a detail underneath it.
Things you can actually ask it.
You do not need special wording. Type it the way you would explain it to a person. Here is what a request looks like and what comes back — these are the kinds of jobs it is built for, written out so you can copy the shape.
A small website
"Make a one-page website for my bakery, with the menu and opening hours."
You get the finished page files sent to you. Open them in your browser to look. Reply "add a photo section" or "make the font bigger" and it edits them.
A boring job, done for you
"Rename all these photos so they start with the date."
You get a small program that does it, and it runs it first to prove it works. This is the kind of thing that takes a person an afternoon and takes it a minute.
Something for your friends
"Build a Wordle game using our group's inside jokes as the words."
You get a playable game you can send round. This is the single most common first thing people ask for, because it is fun and you can tell immediately whether it worked.
Reading and summarising
"Look up which of these three board games plays best with four people."
It can search the web and read pages, then give you an answer with the reasons attached. Check anything that matters — it can be confidently wrong, exactly like a person who skim-read.
Making sense of a spreadsheet
"Here is a CSV of my sales. Which month was worst and why?"
Attach the file to your message in Discord. It reads it, does the arithmetic in a real program rather than guessing at it, and tells you what it found. It can read pictures you send it too.
Learning, if you want to
"Explain what you just did, as if I have never coded."
It will. You are allowed to use it purely as a tutor that happens to also do the work — a lot of people start that way and never write a line themselves.
So what actually happens when I ask?
You can watch the whole thing happen in the message as it works. This is roughly the sequence:
It works out a plan
It reads what you asked and decides what steps are needed, in what order.
It gets its own private computer
A small, sealed computer is started just for you. Your files live there. Nobody else can see it or reach it — not other people in your Discord server, not other Ergod users.
It does the work, and shows you
It writes files, runs them, and reads whatever comes back. You see each step appear as it goes, so you are never staring at a blank screen wondering.
It fixes its own mistakes
When something breaks, it reads the error and tries again. This is the part that makes it feel different from a chatbot: you are not the one debugging.
It hands you the result
The finished files arrive in your chat, ready to download. You can also browse everything it made from the dashboard in your browser — click a file to read it there, download any single one, or put it on a public link you can send to someone and switch off later.
It remembers
Tell it something about you once — "I run a bakery", "keep explanations short" — and it still knows next week. Your personal memory is private to you. Shared rooms keep separate memory for the group.
What does free actually get me?
Free is genuinely free — no card, no trial that expires. Here is exactly what it is, including the part most sites would not volunteer.
Daily usage
A full day, every day
Free includes a daily allowance for chatting, creating and playing. Bigger jobs can use more. /usage shows what remains and when it resets. Your first day starts with a usage bonus on top, and that bonus never expires.
Storage
1 GB of files
Far more than a beginner will use. Websites, scripts and games are tiny.
Everything that makes it work
Memory, files, the web, all 92 tools
The free tier is not a crippled demo: it is the same agent and the same tools. Paid plans add a larger model lineup, more usage and storage, and hosting web rooms.
A top-up for a click
Credits for voting
Voting for Ergod on the bot directory top.gg tops up your credits — kept until you use them, spent after the day's usage, never expiring — for free, for about ten seconds of clicking. top.gg lets you vote again every cooldown, up to twice a day. It is the biggest lever you have on Free.
/usage, which shows how much is used and how much remains, and when it resets.What free does not include: the full model shortlist (Free picks from a smaller curated lineup), sub-agents, channel personas, sharing your own workspace with named collaborators, hosting a browser room for the people you invite (a game table opens on any plan), and hosting more than three shared channel sessions at a time — Free hosts up to three across servers. Joining someone else’s room or session is always free. Those are the paid features, and they are described on the pricing section. The paid tiers are $9.99 and $19.99 a month; the second is the same product with roughly double the headroom, not a better one.
Is this for you?
The useful version of this question includes the cases where the answer is no. Here is both halves.
Words you will see, in plain English.
These turn up on the rest of this site and across the wider AI world. None of them are as complicated as they sound, and you do not need any of them to start.
- Agent
- Software allowed to take its own steps to finish a job, rather than only answering and stopping. That is Ergod.
- Model
- The actual AI brain doing the thinking. There are many, made by different companies, and they are better and worse at different things. Free picks from a small lineup of 4 hosted models, with a good general-purpose one chosen for you by default.
- Sandbox / container
- The small sealed computer your work runs on. "Sealed" is the point: what happens in yours cannot touch anyone else's, and nothing you run can escape it.
- Workspace
- Simply the folder of files inside your sandbox. Everything Ergod makes for you lives here, and you can download any of it whenever you want.
- Session
- One ongoing conversation with its own history. Like separate chat threads — you can keep a "bakery website" session apart from a "photo renaming" one, and go back to either.
- Usage
- How much of your allowance a piece of work uses up. It is not counted in messages — a quick question uses a little, a big build uses more. Ergod shows you what is left as a percentage, so you never have to count anything yourself.
- Tool
- One specific ability, like "read a file", "search the web" or "run a program". Ergod has 92 of them available. You never call these yourself; it picks what it needs.
- Slash command
- A shortcut you type starting with "/", like
/help. They work in Discord, and a smaller set works in the browser too — there, typing "/" pops up a list of them with a line explaining each, so you can read what exists rather than memorise it. Handy later. You do not need a single one to get started: plain sentences work. - Sub-agent
- Ergod handing part of a big job to a copy of itself to work on in parallel. Useful on large tasks. Available on the paid tiers.
- MCP
- A standard way to plug an outside service (a task tracker, say) into an AI so it can use it. Genuinely for tinkerers. Ignore it until you want it.
- BYOK
- "Bring your own key" — if you already pay an AI company like OpenAI or Anthropic directly, you can plug that account in and Ergod will use it. Your usage then goes roughly 5× further, because you are paying the AI bill yourself. Optional, and available on every tier including Free.
The fastest way to understand it is to ask it for something.
Free, and nothing to install. Ask for one small thing and see what comes back.