Documentation
One markdown corpus, two renders: this website and (later) an in-app LLM skill.
Start hereGetting started
The one guided path from a fresh install to your first running session — create a workspace, connect a provider, add a model, clone an agent, make a project, and chat. Every step links to the concept behind it for depth.
Take the guided path →The lay of the land
Where everything lives, and how to move around it.
- Layout & navigation The four regions of the Brisal window — header, sidebar, pane, breadcrumb — and how to move between workspaces, projects, and sessions.
- Workspaces The top-level container that walls off one context — its projects, providers, agents, skills, and theme — from another. Most people make one; the feature exists for those who need the separation.
- Projects A project is the container inside a workspace where the actual work happens — it holds your sessions and its own agents and skills. Trust is the gate that keeps a project's own skills and hooks inert until you approve them.
Set up a chat
The three pieces that turn an LLM into an agent you can talk to — set up in this order.
- 1 Providers The LLM service Brisal talks to — like Mistral — configured with the endpoint, limits, and key needed to reach it. Brisal ships built-in providers you connect into a workspace and then own.
- 2 Models The specific LLM a request actually runs — like Mistral Medium 3.5 — belonging to a provider and carrying its own context limits, capabilities, and cost. Brisal ships built-in models you add to a provider and then own.
- 3 Agents The assistant you actually chat with — a chosen model wrapped in a system prompt and behavior settings so it acts a certain way. Brisal ships a built-in agent you clone into a workspace and then own.
Doing the work
The chat loop itself, and the skills an agent can draw on.
- Sessions A session is one conversation with an agent, scoped to a project — the chat-and-work loop where you send messages, the agent streams back replies and runs tools, and everything is kept as a transcript you can leave and return to. It's the place all the other pieces (provider, model, agent, skills) finally meet real work.
- Skills A skill is a packaged, reusable instruction set an agent can draw on — a Markdown file (SKILL.md) with a little frontmatter, discovered from one of four tiers (builtin, external, workspace, project). The agent can pull one in on its own, or you can invoke it by name with /skill.
Control & safety
Guardrails, configuration, and making Brisal your own.
- Trust Trust is Brisal's deny-by-default gate on a project's own skills and hooks — the project-local code that would otherwise run automatically as you, on your machine. Until you explicitly trust a project, that code stays inert. Trust is an exposure gate, not a sandbox.
- Settings Settings is where you configure Brisal. Everything lives in one of two tiers — a machine-wide system tier and a per-workspace tier — and the two tiers combine in two different ways. Appearance and shortcuts merge (a workspace overrides the system defaults field by field); providers, models, and agents are copied (the system tier is a read-only catalog you copy into a workspace to make your own). You edit in the workspace; the system tier is shown, not changed.
- Appearance & Theming How Brisal looks is set along three axes — mode (light/dark), font size, and palette (the color identity). Appearance is per-workspace, resolved over a system-wide default. Palettes are data: a palette is a token-only CSS file you drop into a workspace's themes folder, and it appears in the picker.
Reference
Field tables and shortcuts for hand-tuning — look them up when you need them.