This is the fastest path from "never heard of Fleet" to "agents running and coordinating on my repo." I'll keep it tight.
What you need
A Mac, Linux, or WSL2 terminal. An existing Claude Code setup (Fleet orchestrates Claude Code agents). Five minutes.
That's the whole list. No Docker, no Node.js, no package manager, no cloud account.
Install
curl -fsSL https://fleetctl.ai/install | sh
This downloads a single binary. The entire product is that binary. Confirm it worked:
fleet version
Initialize a fleet on your repo
cd into whatever project you want to try this on and run:
fleet init
Fleet creates a .fleet/ directory with a starter config. Open .fleet/config.yaml. You'll see something like this:
agents:
- name: product-owner
role: product-owner
model: claude-sonnet # ticket refinement doesn't need Opus
subscribes_to:
- ticket_created
- name: frontend-dev
role: frontend-developer
model: claude-opus # complex implementation work
department: engineering
subscribes_to:
- ticket_ready
- name: tech-lead
role: tech-lead
model: claude-sonnet # review works well on Sonnet
department: engineering
subscribes_to:
- pr_needs_review
Three agents out of the box. The PO agent subscribes to new tickets and refines them; when it publishes a targeted ticket_ready event the matching developer agent wakes up and picks up the work. The tech lead agent wakes up when a PR needs review.
Notice the model config. Each agent runs the model appropriate to its job. Sonnet for ticket refinement and review. Opus for implementation. You can change these to whatever you want later.
Start the fleet
fleet start
Check what's running:
fleet status
Output:
Fleet: 3 agents running | 0 idle | 0 errors
product-owner running (tmux: fleet-po) model: sonnet
frontend-dev running (tmux: fleet-frontend-dev) model: opus
tech-lead running (tmux: fleet-tech-lead) model: sonnet
Each agent runs in a managed session. Fleet handles agent startup and shutdown; if an agent's session dies, the watcher re-dispatches the work through the reactive chain rather than respawning the session.
Turn on the reactive engine
This is the part that changes everything. Up until now you've been manually prompting each agent. The watcher makes the pipeline autonomous.
fleet watcher start --supervised
The watcher monitors GitHub labels, event subscriptions, and cron schedules. When a condition is met, it routes the event to the right agent.
Test it. Go to one of your GitHub issues and add the label "ready." Watch your terminal.
Fleet detects the label. The PO agent picks up the ticket, refines it with acceptance criteria and scope, and routes it to frontend-dev. The development agent starts working. When it opens a PR, a pr_needs_review event fires and tech-lead picks it up.
Nobody prompted anything. Nobody read an email. Nobody manually assigned a reviewer. The event chain ran itself.
Check the audit log
fleet log
Timeline of every event, every agent action, every decision. Timestamps, agent names, event types, outcomes. This is the thing your engineering manager will care about. Remember where it is.
What to do next
You now have a working agent fleet with reactive coordination. A few things worth trying from here.
Browse the template library. Fleet ships with 120+ pre-built agent templates. Run fleet template list to see them. There's a full-stack dev team with PO routing, a DevOps pipeline crew, a security review squad, an SRE monitoring setup, and a lot more.
Add an SRE agent. Subscribe it to ticket_shipped events so it runs post-merge close-out after a change lands. It can check error rates and surface anything that looks off. Runs great on Haiku since it's making simple threshold decisions.
Turn on Brain. Fleet's Brain runs 6-dimension agent evaluation plus a separate risk model that drives auto-quarantine. fleet brain start activates it.
If you're evaluating Fleet for your team
The fastest way to build an internal case is to run Fleet on one repo for a week, then pull the fleet log, point to the event chain (ticket, PO refinement, agent implementation, automated review, merge), and show how the pipeline ran autonomously.
There's a page at fleetctl.ai/for-leaders that covers the business case without any code. Send it to your VP. It speaks their language.