# Quickstart


This is the tutorial track for a person setting cairn up and running it through an agent: the linear path from an empty install to a plan you can resume from a clean session. cairn keeps that plan in a durable task graph outside the conversation, so a context reset reloads it instead of losing it.

Read these in order. Each page builds on the one before it.

- [Install cairn](/cairn/get-started/install-cairn) — add cairn to kli declaratively or at runtime, serve it to any MCP client, and confirm the tool surface is live.
- [Your first cairn session](/cairn/get-started/your-first-cairn-session) — run the bootstrap-observe-handoff loop once, end to end, and learn what each returned string means.
- [Plan and resume](/cairn/get-started/plan-and-resume) — fork phases, order them with `depends-on`, ask the frontier what is ready, complete a phase, and bootstrap back into the plan.

When you have run the loop and want to understand why the graph behaves as it does, [Concepts](/cairn/concepts) explains the task graph, the current pointer, the event log, and the capability boundary. The full surface lives in the [Reference](/cairn/reference): the fourteen MCP tools, the TQ query language, the built-in views, and the closed edge, status, and field enums.