Installing

npm install -g @ajaykumarnpm/talea

The package name is scoped; the command it installs is just talea. (npm’s typo-squatting filter refused the bare name talea — it called it too similar to tape, taze, table and jaltea — so the package wears a scope and the binary does not.)

Check it landed

talea --version
talea doctor

talea doctor is the one that matters. It checks, in order:

Check	What a failure means
Node.js	Older than 20. Upgrade before anything else.
git	Not on PATH.
SSH to GitHub	Your key is not reaching GitHub. Cloning will fail until it does, or until you pass --protocol https.
GitHub API	No token. Not a failure — you get public repos only.
Workspace	Which tree talea found, and whether this machine has chosen what to keep yet.

It exits non-zero if something is actually broken, so it is safe to put in a setup script.

Upgrading

talea upgrade            # reinstall from npm at the latest version
talea update             # the same thing
talea upgrade --check    # report only, change nothing

talea checks for a new version at most once a day and prints a one-line notice. It never updates itself silently — it moves checkouts around, and a tool that changes behaviour underneath you mid-session is not one you can trust with that.

talea upgrade --off turns the daily notice off, --on turns it back on, and TALEA_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 disables it for a single shell.

Caution

A copy of talea that is a git checkout refuses to self-upgrade. Replacing somebody’s working branch with a release is data loss with a friendly name.

Teaching your agent to use it

One more command, if you work in Claude Code:

talea skill install

That installs a skill at user scope, so every project you open has it. For your agent is what it does and what it deliberately refuses to do.

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Next: Your first machine.