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This quickstart takes you from zero to a real result you can verify: a list of your idle EC2 instances with projected monthly savings, returned by an AI agent reading your actual AWS account. Allow ~10 minutes, mostly spent creating the AWS role and waiting for CloudThinker to inventory your resources.
What you’ll need: an email address, an AWS account with admin (or sufficient IAM) permissions to create a role, and a few minutes to read what the agent returns.

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The 30-second syntax

Talk to agents in plain language. The full pattern is:
  • @agent — who does the work: @alex (cloud), @oliver (security), @tony (database), @kai (Kubernetes), @anna (coordination).
  • #tool (optional) — the output you want: #dashboard, #report, #visualize, #recommend, #alert.
  • Your request — what you need, in your own words. Add any context inline.
See the CloudThinker Language reference for the full syntax.
1

Register

Sign up at app.cloudthinker.io.
  1. Enter name, work email, and password
  2. Click the verification link in your inbox
  3. Confirm your profile
Success state: You land in your personal organization with a default workspace — the shared area that holds your connections, chats, and agents — ready. The left sidebar shows New chat, Skills, and Artifacts at the top, and an empty conversation panel on the right.
Free 14-day trial — no charge until day 15. See Pricing for plan limits.
2

Connect AWS

No AWS account handy, or not ready to hand over credentials? Try the read-only demo environment first: pick a connection marked Demo available, take the demo offer in the connect dialog, and you land in a chat seeded with an editable overview prompt. Demo chats spend credits like real ones. Come back here when you’re ready to connect your own account.
Go to Settings → Connections → New Connection → AWS, then pick an authentication method:For the IAM Role path, CloudThinker shows you the External ID to paste into the trust policy and the minimum permissions to attach. The full AWS Console walkthrough — with CloudShell commands and trust-policy JSON — is in the AWS connection guide.Safe by default: the recommended starter policy is read-only. Write actions (rightsizing, instance termination, security-group changes) require a separate policy and run under your approval workflow — no agent ever pushes a change without your sign-off on the first runs.Success state: the connection card flips to Connected with a green dot. Discovery — CloudThinker’s automatic inventory of your cloud resources — starts immediately; within ~2 minutes you’ll see a non-zero resource count (instances, RDS, S3, etc.) on the card. If discovery stays at zero, jump to Troubleshooting below.
3

Verify discovery

Return to Settings → Connections and open the AWS connection card.You should see:
  • A list of regions with non-zero resource counts
  • At least one of: EC2 instances, S3 buckets, RDS databases, Lambda functions
  • A successful discovery status without AccessDenied errors
Success state: The resource count matches roughly what you expect for the account. If you connected a sandbox with five EC2s and you see five — you’re done. If you see zero or your numbers look wrong, see Troubleshooting.
4

Run your first prompt

Click New chat and paste:
Alex, the cloud engineer agent, queries CloudWatch utilization metrics, joins them with the resource inventory, and returns a structured summary.Success state: a response within ~30 seconds containing:
  • Resource counts — EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, etc. by region
  • Idle candidates — instances with sustained <20% CPU over the last 30 days
  • Projected savings — monthly dollars at risk if you keep paying for idle resources
  • Inline reasoning — “I checked CloudWatch’s CPUUtilization metric for the last 30 days and filtered instances where the 95th percentile stayed below 20%”
You can drill into any line: click an instance to see its tags, region, owner, and the full metric history Alex consulted.
5

Try a tool command

For richer output shapes, prefix the prompt with a #tool:
Alex returns an interactive dashboard (charts you can sort/filter) instead of a text answer.Other tools worth trying once you’re connected:
Success state: the dashboard renders inline; recommendations include both the change and the projected monthly delta.

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You’re done when…

  • You can see your AWS resource count on the connection card and it matches reality
  • @alex returned a summary that named specific instances or services you recognize
  • You can explain to a teammate what Alex did to find the idle resources (read the inline reasoning back)
If all three are true, you’ve completed the first-success flow. From your next sign-in, the Home screen is your starting point: a Needs you feed of anything waiting on your approval, a status line per module, and a banner for any live incident.

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Troubleshooting

Likely cause: trust policy missing the External ID, or the role’s permission policy is too narrow.Check:
  1. In the AWS Console → IAM → Roles → your role → Trust relationships, confirm the sts:ExternalId condition exactly matches what CloudThinker showed you (no extra whitespace).
  2. The role’s permission policy includes at minimum ec2:Describe*, rds:Describe*, s3:List*, cloudwatch:GetMetricStatistics. Full list: AWS connection minimum permissions.
  3. The role’s max-session-duration is ≥ 1 hour.
Fix: correct the trust policy / permissions, then click Reconnect on the connection card. Discovery restarts automatically.
Likely cause: the role can be assumed but lacks Describe permissions on the regions/services your account actually uses, or the account is in a region you haven’t enabled.Check:
  • Go to Connection details → Discovery log. Each region attempted shows its result. AccessDenied errors tell you exactly which API call was rejected.
  • Confirm the account actually has resources in at least one region the role can see.
Fix: widen the permission policy to cover the failing API, or enable the relevant region under the connection’s region scope.
Likely cause: the connection isn’t bound to the current workspace. Each connection lives in one workspace; you might be chatting in a different one.Fix: confirm the workspace selector (top of sidebar) shows the same workspace where you added AWS. Switch workspaces, or re-add the connection in the workspace you’re chatting in.
Likely cause: Alex couldn’t reach a tool (CloudWatch, Cost Explorer) — usually a permission gap. Generic answers are the fallback when concrete data isn’t available.Check: scroll to the bottom of Alex’s reply; the Tools used section lists every API call attempted, with success/failure. Failed calls show the AWS error.Fix: add the missing permission to the role (CloudWatch read for utilization, Cost Explorer read for spend), reconnect, then retry the prompt.
Likely cause: initial discovery still running — Alex is waiting for the inventory to finish before reasoning over it. Subsequent prompts are much faster.Fix: wait until the AWS connection card shows non-zero resource counts, then re-run the prompt. Discovery typically completes in 2–5 minutes for an account with under 500 resources.

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Next steps

AgenticOps quick wins by role

Find your role, copy a prompt, get a real result in under a minute

Connect more tools

Bring in Datadog, GitHub, Kubernetes, Postgres, Slack — agents activate as connections appear

Invite your team

Add teammates with Owner, Admin, Developer, or Viewer roles and assign workspace access

Upgrade your plan

Add seats and move up from the trial when your team is ready — per-seat billing, upgrade any time