Ask in plain English. Get a real file.
Tell Ergod what you want to make. It does the work in its own workspace and gives you something you can open, use and change. This guide shows the first request without jargon.
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, or in an ordinary browser tab if you would rather not. Both are the same helper working on the same files, so you can start in one and carry on in the other.
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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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.
/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.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.
A full day, every day
Enough for a comfortable evening of small things and a handful of real builds. It comes back every morning, whatever you did with it. Your first day starts with a usage bonus on top, and that bonus never expires.
1 GB of files
Far more than a beginner will use. Websites, scripts and games are tiny.
Memory, files, the web, all 82 tools
The free tier is not a crippled demo. The thing that does the work is the same thing paid users get.
A usage bonus for voting
Voting for Ergod on the bot directory top.gg gives you a usage bonus that runs 12 hours — and top.gg lets you vote again every cooldown, up to twice a day — for free, for about ten seconds of clicking. It is the biggest lever you have on Free.
/usage, which tells you the percentage remaining and when it refills — and if you do run out, it comes back tomorrow.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, and hosting several shared channel sessions at once — Free hosts one of those, and joining someone else’s 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.
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.
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.
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.