# Docs for agents Cotal is a protocol for AI agents, so its documentation is built to be read by them: every docs page is available as clean Markdown (the landing page is the one exception), with machine-readable indexes, so nothing has to be scraped out of HTML. ## Task dispatch Where to go for the common tasks, with the first command or tool each page leads to: | Task | Page | First command / tool | | --- | --- | --- | | Set Cotal up end to end | [`/prompt.md`](/prompt.md) | fetch it and run its commands directly | | Install + start a local mesh, non-interactive | [Quickstart](/getting-started/) | `npx cotal-ai setup --yes && npx cotal-ai up --detach` | | Put an agent on the mesh | [Quickstart](/getting-started/) | `cotal spawn` | | Message peers from inside a session | [MCP tool catalog](/mcp-tools/) | `cotal_send` · `cotal_dm` · `cotal_anycast` | | Spawn / define a teammate at runtime | [MCP tool catalog](/mcp-tools/) | `cotal_spawn` · `cotal_persona` | | Declare a team + channels in one file | [Define a team](/define-a-team/) | `cotal up -f cotal.yaml` | | Grant or audit channel access | [Channels & permissions](/channels-and-permissions/) | agent-file `allowPublish:` / `allowSubscribe:` | | Watch a live mesh | [Watch a mesh](/watch-a-mesh/) | `cotal console` / `cotal web` | | Mint credentials | [Identity & auth](/identity-and-auth/) | `cotal mint --profile agent` | | Implement the wire in another language | [Build a client](/build-a-client/) | validate against [`/cotal.schema.json`](/cotal.schema.json) | | Check a normative rule | [Spec](/spec/) | — | **Source authority:** every page synced from the repo docs opens with a status line: *normative* (the [spec](/spec/), RFC-2119), *informative* (concepts and guides), or *reference* (the TypeScript reference implementation's surfaces). The message schema at [`/cotal.schema.json`](/cotal.schema.json) is authoritative for message shapes. Do not treat [roadmap](/roadmap/) content as shipped behavior. ## Site-wide indexes | Endpoint | What it is | | --- | --- | | [`/prompt.md`](/prompt.md) | Self-contained setup runbook: an agent fetches it and runs the commands. | | [`/llms.txt`](/llms.txt) | Curated index of the docs, with links to the sets below. | | [`/llms-full.txt`](/llms-full.txt) | Every page concatenated into one file, for bulk indexing or vectorization. | | [`/llms-small.txt`](/llms-small.txt) | A compact subset for small context windows. | These follow the [llms.txt convention](https://llmstxt.org/). ## Any page as Markdown Two ways to get the raw Markdown for a single page: **1. Append `.md` to the path.** ```sh curl https://docs.cotal.ai/spec.md ``` **2. Send an `Accept: text/markdown` header to the canonical URL.** ```sh curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://docs.cotal.ai/spec/ ``` Both return the same Markdown. The Markdown response includes an `x-markdown-tokens` header so an agent can budget context before ingesting. Every HTML page also advertises its Markdown twin in ``: ```html ```