# Your Team Chat Can Now Include AI Agents as Members > Source: > Published: 2026-11-14 15:14:21+00:00 agentes.chat is an open source team chat app. It works like Slack. The difference is that AI agents join as members. They sit in channels and direct messages next to people. They read the channel. They answer when the work is theirs. They hand work back to people when it is not. An agent is software that acts on a goal. Each agent has a role, an owner, and a monthly budget. The budget caps what the agent can spend on model calls. The owner gets the approval requests and the budget alerts. The project appeared on GitHub on November 9, 2026. Five days later it had 1,375 stars and 241 forks. The repository lists 8,715 commits and 13 releases. That is fast growth for a project five days old. Agents think with a model you choose. You can pick Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Gemini, or Grok. You can also pick any model on OpenRouter. Your organization adds its own model key in the app. Model calls bill through your model key. Agents connect to outside tools through MCP. MCP (Model Context Protocol) is the open standard that lets an agent call outside tools. The organization connects an MCP server once. Official servers for Linear, Sentry, Notion, and Stripe connect in one click. Each agent gets only the scopes you grant it. Each agent gets its own computer and browser. The agent runs commands and code on that computer. The agent opens sites, fills in forms, and reads pages in its browser. You can watch the browser live in the chat. You can take over for a login or a captcha. Then you hand it back with a note. A message with no @mention goes to the router. The router is the part that picks which agents answer. It can pick up to four agents, or none. The message says who picked. The router never grants a permission. Merges, deploys, and anything a connector marks sensitive wait for a person. The approval shows as a card in the chat. The owner or an admin approves it. The approved action runs once, exactly as approved. Agents keep decisions, facts, preferences, and lessons from conversations. They learn from corrections and refused approvals. They can propose changes to their own instructions. A person accepts or rejects each change. An agent can also work on a schedule or on an event. For example, it can report every weekday at 9am. It can also act when a GitHub pull request opens. It delivers the result to a channel or a direct message. The app also has threads, a wiki, a task board, and a notifications inbox. Agents can load skills from Markdown files. The whole app comes in 14 languages. Self-hosting takes one command on a Linux server. Run curl -fsSL [https://agentes.chat/install](https://agentes.chat/install) | sh. The installer asks first, then installs Docker if it is missing. It puts the app on your Tailscale network with private HTTPS. Tailscale is a tool that builds a private network between your devices. The README says setup takes about 10 minutes. Postgres is the only dependency. Postgres is the database the app stores data in. Web, desktop, and phone apps connect to your server. The phone app works on iPhone and Android. The desktop app works on macOS, Windows, and Linux. You can also use agentes.chat Cloud. Cloud is the paid hosted option. The README gives no price for Cloud. Self-hosting is free, under the AGPL-3.0 license. AGPL-3.0 is a free software license. There is no license key. Several features are still in beta. The agent browser is beta. The Postgres connector is beta. Agent mailboxes are beta. The phone app is beta. The desktop app is beta. Beta means the feature works but may still change. The desktop app has a rough edge on first install. The Mac build has no Apple check yet. The Windows installer has no Microsoft signature yet. The first open asks once. The README says the download page shows each step. You pay for the models. Self-hosting is free, but each model call bills through your own key. Each agent has a monthly budget. The budget is checked before every call. Set the budget low at first. Watch the spend before you raise it. The project is five days old. That is very young. The code base is large and the team ships fast. Expect rough edges and fast change. Read the README and the issue list before you move a real team onto it. The license matters if you change the code. If you change the code and do not publish your changes, you need the commercial license. The project sells that license for this case. Check COMMERCIAL.md in the repository if that applies to you. agentes.chat treats agents as team members, not as a sidebar bot. That is the right idea. Agents work where everyone can see them. Approvals and budgets sit in the open. The design puts the person in control of the risky steps. The catch is age. The project is five days old. The core chat works. Several agent features are still beta. A small team that likes to test new tools can try it now. A team that needs a stable chat tool should wait and watch the releases. Try self-hosting first. It is free, and it takes about 10 minutes. Set small budgets on each agent. Let the agents work in one channel before you give them the whole workspace. I test AI tools and build in public: