For: admins, and only the first time. The setup wizard appears for an admin of a workspace that has no playbooks in it yet, and for nobody else. If you were invited into a workspace that is already running, you want Someone added me to a sqemes workspace instead.
The wizard is short on purpose, and it does not ask everybody the same questions: once you have chosen where you want to use your playbooks, it shows you only the steps for those places.
The steps, in order
1. Welcome. One screen that says what you are about to do. Nothing to fill in. It exists because the first version of this wizard opened straight onto a form, which testers described as being thrown into cold water.
2. Create playbooks. You describe your company briefly, and sqemes drafts a starting set of playbooks from that description. You review them before anything is saved, and you can go back to the description from the review. This step does not exist on a self-hosted instance — starter playbooks are a Cloud feature.
3. Where to use them. This is the branch point, and the only step whose answer changes the rest of the wizard. Pick one or several:
In your browser — your playbooks inside ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, through the sqemes extension.
In sqemes Chat — run them here in the webapp, with an AI provider you connect.
In Claude Code, Cursor and Codex — the same playbooks and personas in any tool that connects over MCP.
4. Extension — only if you picked the browser. A button opens the Chrome Web Store; the step notices when you come back with it installed. Nothing here is permanent: without the extension your playbooks still work in sqemes Chat and in your MCP tools, and you can install it later from Settings.
5. MCP — only if you picked Claude Code, Cursor or Codex. The step gives you an endpoint URL to copy and add in your tool as a custom MCP server. Some tools then ask you to sign in, others ask for a key, which you create under Settings → MCP Server — the ready-made config snippet is there too. This step asks nothing of you inside sqemes: the connecting happens in the other tool, whenever you get to it.
6. AI provider keys — shown if you picked sqemes Chat, or if your instance cannot do anything AI-powered without a key at all, which is the case on self-host and in a Cloud workspace with no funded model. If neither applies, the step is skipped, because it would be a question with no occasion; you add a key later under Settings → Integrations.
7. You're set. A list of what is done and what is not, and where each remaining thing lives. Deliberately just a summary: there is no final button that starts something else.
What editors and members see instead
Nothing. Neither role gets a wizard, because by the time they arrive the workspace already has playbooks in it and there is nothing left to set up. What differs is what they can do once they are in:
An editor can create and edit playbooks and personas straight away, and can manage the workspace's AI provider keys — but not the team and not the plan.
A member can use playbooks and personas, and can create their own MCP connection, but cannot create playbooks or change any workspace setting.
So inviting people is not the end of setting up — it is the point at which somebody else needs to know what they are looking at. That is what Someone added me to a sqemes workspace is for; it is worth sending with the invitation.
If you closed it too early
The offer to finish setting up comes back on the dashboard, and it stays there for as long as the workspace still has no playbooks. It does not matter which button you left through, or how far you got.
What the wizard deliberately does not do
It does not invite your team, and it does not set up who may see which playbook. Both are worth doing next, and both live in Settings rather than in the wizard — a workspace with one person in it has no access questions to answer yet.
One known limit, if you self-host: the extension step's automatic "installed" detection only works on app.sqemes.com. On any other origin the browser never answers that question, so the step will not tick itself even when the extension is installed correctly. This is a property of how Chrome scopes extension messaging, not a setting you have missed.
Updated 27 September 2026 · Article version 1