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A starter is a harness somebody already wrote, published for you to copy. You do not start from an empty repository; you start from one that answers messages, and then you change it.
The Starters tab with the Assistant starter

The Starters tab: a harness to copy, and what it is

Assistant is the one marked Default, and it is the starter your account was given a copy of when you signed up — which is why Your harnesses says Copied from Assistant under a harness you never created. It is described as a general-purpose agent with a Linux sandbox: runs code, reads files, uses your skills and your standing notes.

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Copying one

Click the card. Splox asks where the copy should run, then what to call the two things it is about to make:
The Name them step with a harness field and a machine field

A copy of the starter, and the machine that runs it

One click creates both: a git repository of your own, seeded with the starter’s tree, and a machine that checks it out and runs it. The names default to the starter’s name and Sandbox; change them if you are going to have more than one.

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What you get

A copy is a real repository, not a template you fill in. It carries the programs the starter declared — programs/splox/main.py with the agents in it, the hooks/ that shape its runs, the harness’s own tools/, its prompts and its evals. From then on it is yours and it drifts from the original. Publishing a new version of the starter does not reach into harnesses copied from it, and nothing you change is pushed back.

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What happens next

The machine checks the harness out at ~/harness, installs whatever the tree declares, and starts answering. Nothing else is required of you: open a chat on the new machine and it works. To change who that agent is, edit the checkout. The agent can do it for you — that is what the ~/harness checkout is for — or you can clone the repository and push. Either way the next message reads the new file.

Changing what your agent is

The tour of the tree you just copied.

Versions and going back

How an edit reaches the machine that runs it.