Your First Instance - chowder

So you’ve signed up, you’ve got your API key, and you’re staring at a terminal wondering what to do next. Let’s fix that. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a running OpenClaw agent that you can talk to, remembers what you said, and supports multiple conversation threads. All through curl.

This guide assumes you already have an organization and API key. If not, hit the Quickstart first — it takes 2 minutes.

Before we start

Set your API key as an environment variable so you don’t have to paste it into every command:

export CHOWDER_KEY="chd_org_your_key_here"

Every request in this guide uses $CHOWDER_KEY for auth.

Create an instance

Recap

Here’s what you just did:

Step	Endpoint	What happened
Create	`POST /v1/instances`	Provisioned a sandbox + OpenClaw agent
Poll status	`GET /v1/instances/{id}/status`	Waited for `running`
Chat	`POST /v1/instances/{id}/responses`	Sent messages, got responses
Sessions	`POST /v1/instances/{id}/session/{name}/responses`	Created isolated conversation threads
Stop/Start	`POST /v1/instances/{id}/stop` and `/start`	Paused and resumed the instance
Delete	`DELETE /v1/instances/{id}`	Cleaned up

What’s next?

Connect Telegram

Wire up a Telegram bot so users can DM your agent.

Install Skills

Give your agent web search, code execution, and more.