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If you use an AI coding assistant, you can hand it the setup instead of doing it by hand. Copy the prompt below into your assistant. It installs the PolyAI CLI, signs you in with GitHub in your browser, creates your account if needed, and saves an API key for the PolyAI APIs and Dialog RSN. Nothing sensitive passes through the assistant — the sign-in and the key stay inside the poly apikey command.

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The prompt

Copy everything in this block.
Prompt

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What the assistant will do

  1. Check for uv and ask how you’d like to install it if it’s missing.
  2. Install the CLI with uv tool install --python 3.14 polyai-adk.
  3. Run poly apikey --region studio and show you the sign-in URL.
  4. Wait while you approve the sign-in in your browser with GitHub.
  5. Show you the masked summary once it completes.
  6. Verify the key with poly project list --region studio.
The assistant will ask for your “go” before running anything, and again before anything that needs a permission prompt in its own tool. This only gets you an API key — to set up the ADK itself for building agents, use poly setup/poly login instead.

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What gets written where

  • The API key, to ~/.poly/credentials.json (mode 600) under the studio region — every poly command reads this.
  • POLY_API_KEY, to your shell profile (~/.zshrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc, or your fish config) — for the PolyAI SDKs and other tools that read it directly.
  • On Windows, POLY_API_KEY goes into your user environment variables instead of a profile file.

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Requirements

  • Python — handled by uv, which downloads 3.14 if you don’t already have it.
  • uv itself — brew install uv, winget install astral-sh.uv, or pipx install uv.
  • A GitHub account.
  • An AI coding assistant that can run shell commands — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Copilot CLI all qualify. This prompt has been tested with Claude Code.

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If something goes wrong

  • poly not found after install — run uv tool update-shell and open a new terminal.
  • poly apikey not recognised — run uv tool upgrade polyai-adk.
  • POLY_API_KEY already set to a different value — the command stops with exit code 2; the assistant will ask you before rerunning with --force.
You can always do the same steps yourself — see Getting started for the poly login flow.

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Telemetry

poly apikey sends anonymous usage events so we can see where setup fails; the key and sign-in token are never included. Set DO_NOT_TRACK=1 or POLY_NO_TELEMETRY=1 to opt out.
Last modified on September 11, 2026