What do I need before installing Harpy?

Windows 10 or 11 (x64), an active AI-research subscription (today that means Anthropic Claude; bring-your-own-model is coming), administrative rights on the machine for the first run, and the broker API keys for whichever module you are installing — Alpaca for Trade, Kraken for Crypto, and so on.

Does Harpy need administrator rights?

Only on first launch, and only so the installer can register the scheduled cycles under your user account. Day-to-day operation runs as a normal user. The one-time admin step is clearly called out in the install flow.

How do I know the first cycle worked?

Open the dashboard (it launches automatically after install) and watch the module tab. A green dot means the most recent scan fired and wrote an output file. A grey dot means no scan has completed yet (normal for the first 5-45 minutes). A red dot means the scan errored — open the journal tab to see why.

How to install Harpy on Windows — first-cycle setup guide

Short answer: run the installer as administrator, paste your AI-research credentials and your broker API keys into the setup wizard when prompted, wait for the first scheduled cycle to fire (5–45 minutes depending on module), and confirm a green dot in the dashboard. This guide walks you through each step in order, with the failure modes called out where they actually happen.

Step 1 — prerequisites

Before you start the installer, make sure you have:

Windows 10 (1909+) or Windows 11, x64.
Administrator rights on the machine (needed for the first launch only).
An active AI-research subscription — today that means Anthropic Claude (or an Anthropic API key with credit). A bring-your-own-model mode that lets you run on a local model instead is on the roadmap.
The broker API keys for the module you’re installing — Alpaca for Trade, Kraken for Crypto, Polymarket wallet credentials for Polymarket, a Kalshi key pair for Kalshi, Betfair or Racing API credentials for Horses or Greyhounds.
Roughly 600 MB of free disk space.

Step 2 — run the installer as administrator

Run the installer as administrator (right-click, “Run as administrator”). The installer will:

Validate your 31-day lease cryptographically (offline; no network call).
Copy the application files into a per-user folder on your disk.
Prepare the local data folder the scanner will write to.
Launch the setup wizard.

Step 3 — the setup wizard

The wizard is a blocking gate. You can’t reach the dashboard without completing it. It collects, in order: your plan details, your AI-research credentials, and the broker keys specific to the module you installed.

The wizard performs a live validation on each broker key — for Alpaca it pings the account endpoint, for Kraken it calls the balance endpoint, for Polymarket it verifies the signing wallet on chain. If a key is wrong, the wizard tells you which key and refuses to advance. We deliberately avoid the “save and pray” pattern because a broken key wouldn’t surface until the first scheduled cycle, which could be 45 minutes away.

Step 4 — scheduled cycles register

When the wizard closes, Harpy registers exactly the cycles your module needs — no more, no less. For a Trade install you get three:

A position monitor — every 5 minutes during US market hours.
A deep scan — every 45 minutes during US market hours.
A weekday rollover — 06:45 ET.

The first action the installer takes is to clear out any previous Harpy-owned cycles on the machine. This prevents a Trade install on a machine that previously ran Crypto from leaving orphan Crypto cycles firing forever. Switching modules is safe by construction.

Step 5 — wait for the first cycle

The dashboard shows when the first cycle will fire. For the fast position monitor that’s within 5 minutes. For a slower module (Horses) it can be up to an hour. If you don’t want to wait, the dashboard has a run now control that fires the next cycle immediately.

Step 6 — the green-dot check

The dashboard launches automatically after the wizard closes (or you can open it from the system tray). Each module tab shows a status dot:

Grey — no scan has completed yet. Normal during the first cycle.
Green — last cycle fired and wrote a valid output. You’re live.
Yellow — last scan completed but produced an empty target list (intentional; the rubric rejected everything).
Red — last scan errored. Open the journal tab for the reason. Most reds resolve to an expired API key, a rate-limit hit, or a network timeout.

Step 7 — flip to live (when ready)

Trade and Crypto installers default to paper. To go live you re-open the setup wizard, change the mode toggle, and confirm a preflight checklist that asks you to acknowledge — in a free-text field, not a checkbox — that real money is about to be committed. We added the typed acknowledgement deliberately. It’s a 10-second friction that filters accidental clicks; it’s the only step in the wizard we’re unwilling to streamline.

If anything in this flow goes wrong, the journal tab is almost always the right place to start. The journal records every decision the scanner made (and every decision it declined to make), with a short rationale per line. Most install-time problems show up there as a single rejection row pointing at the broken input.