Most people meet an AI assistant as a blank chat box. You type, it answers, and tomorrow you explain everything again. A member works the other way round. It is an AI teammate with one job, its own memory of how you like that job done, and only the tools you allow. You give it work the way you would give work to a colleague, and it comes back when it needs your approval.
This guide walks through making your first member in Upfyn Desktop and giving it a job worth keeping.
Pick a job, not a personality
The best first member does something you already do every week and would happily stop doing. A Monday sales note. Triage of the support inbox. A summary of new supplier quotes. The job should have a clear input, a clear output and a person who checks it, which at first is you.
Avoid starting with "a general assistant". A member is useful because it is narrow. Its memory fills up with the details of one kind of work: which sheet holds the numbers, which customers need a careful tone, which refunds should never be counted as sales.
Make the member
Open Teams in the left rail and choose New member. You can also start from one of the members that come with Upfyn, or import one from a template, a GitHub repository or a zip file.
A new member does not ask you to fill in a long form. It interviews you, one question at a time:
- what it should be called,
- what its job is and what a good result looks like,
- which apps and folders it needs,
- what it must never do without asking you first.
Answer in plain words. "Never send a reply on my behalf" is a perfectly good rule. When the interview ends, the member writes its own rules, duties and tool list. Anything that changes how it behaves waits for your review, so read what it wrote and change anything that is not quite right before you keep it.
Give it the first job in a chat
Open the member's chat and describe the job the way you would brief a new colleague:
Every Monday, pull last week's sales from the team sheet, compare them with the target, and draft a short note to the team in my voice. Put the draft in my email drafts. Do not send it.
The member checks what is connected. If something is missing, such as your CRM, it says so and asks you to sign in. While it works you can watch each step in the chat: the files it read, the pages it opened, the sheet it updated. When it needs a decision, it stops and asks.
Review the first result carefully. This is where the member learns. If the West region should be shown first, say so. If refunds were counted as sales, point it out. The member keeps these corrections in its memory, so the next run starts where this one ended.
Let it remember
Each member keeps its own memory of you, your projects and your corrections. That memory belongs to the member, not to every chat, so your inbox member does not need to know how your finance member formats a forecast.
You can read and edit a member's memory at any time. If something it learned is out of date, such as a new approver or a changed target, change it there rather than repeating it in every chat.
Put it on a schedule
Once a job works well in a chat, make it run on its own. Ask the member, or Upfyn:
Run this every Monday at 9:00 as Weekly Sales.
The schedule appears in Schedules with its trigger, its next runs and its instructions. Every run has a log and its own chat, so you can see what happened on any given Monday. If results pile up unread, the schedule pauses itself instead of producing work nobody looks at.
Bring members together
Some work needs more than one member. A product launch might need research, copy, a page and a set of emails. Put the members in a team chat and give the goal to Upfyn, the main member. Upfyn hands out the work: one member drafts the copy, another builds the page, another checks the links. You follow the progress in one place instead of approving every small step.
Each member still works in its own session with its own tools, so a member that only drafts copy cannot suddenly start sending email.
Stay in control
Members act on your computer, inside the limits you set:
- Each member uses only the tools and folders you allowed in its setup.
- Anything that sends, buys, publishes or deletes waits for your yes.
- When a member uses the browser or the computer, you can watch it, take over, or press Escape to stop it at once.
- Changes to a member's own rules wait for your review.
These limits are what make it reasonable to hand a member real work. You decide where the line is, and the member works up to it.
Where to go next
When your first member has run its job a few times without needing corrections, look for the next repeated task. Most people end up with a small team: one member for the inbox, one for the numbers, one for research, and Upfyn leading them when a job needs more than one.
You can also reach your members from your phone, give them a goal they work towards over several weeks, or put them on a channel such as WhatsApp or Slack so they answer the people who message you.
Ask Upfyn
Use this prompt in Upfyn Desktop to start your first member from a job you already do:
Help me make my first member. Ask me which weekly task I most want to hand over, then interview me for the member's name, its job, the apps and folders it needs, and anything it must never do without asking me. Write its rules for my review, then run the job once in a chat so I can correct the first result.