The board and its stages
Every project in the workspace is a card on the board. It moves through four stages, and each step that moves it on is one you run.
The four stages
| Stage | What it is | What moves it on |
|---|---|---|
| Draft | Your idea in your own words, or one Maria proposed. | ▶ Draw the blueprint |
| Blueprint | Maria's full plan: the problem, the solution, who it's for, what the first version does, the risks, what it will need and where it runs. | ▶ Build MVP |
| Studio | A working first version (the MVP) in its own GitHub repository, improved one prompt at a time in the Lab. | ▶ Ship it |
| Shipped | Finished: a Docker image ready to deploy. The Deploy and Docs tabs appear, and the Lab keeps working. | — |
A fifth column, Dropped, holds the projects you set aside. Each column sorts by when its projects were created or updated, and the search box filters every column at once by name, pitch, stack or feature.
Start a project
Press ＋ New project. There are two ways:
- Describe it yourself. Give it a name, one sentence, what it should do (one feature per line) and Where it runs: 🖥️ Web (ticked by default), 💻 Desktop, 📱 Mobile, or none for just code. More details holds who it's for, the problem, must-haves, what's out of scope, integrations, the look and languages. It's saved as a Draft exactly as you wrote it: nothing runs and no credits are used.
- Generate with Maria. She asks four quick questions (what you know or love, who you'd sell to, how big you want to go, anything to stay away from), then Generate 3 ideas or Just one. The questions are free; generating uses credits. Each idea lands as a Draft, with who pays, how it makes money and why it can win.
Run each step
Open a project (press its card) and press the next step on its action bar. Each step first says what will happen and asks a few optional questions, then runs at once and shows in Running:
- ▶ Draw the blueprint: notes for the blueprint.
- ▶ Build MVP: what the first version must include, what to leave out for now, and how people sign in to it. It can take an hour or more; you can close the page. Before it, on the Blueprint's Overview, you can pick the frontend, backend and database under Stack & data, or leave each on ✨ Maria, you pick.
- ▶ Ship it: a domain (for apps with a screen), anything else, and Write the docs.
One thing runs on a project at a time; different projects run side by side. While something runs on a project, its other controls are greyed out, except Stop and Abort.
A step that fails never loses the project: a failed blueprint stays in Draft, a failed MVP build goes back to Blueprint and says why it stopped, and a failed prompt is undone and stays in the Lab.
Running, Stop and Abort
The Running page shows what Maria is working on now, one card per run, and for how long.
- Stop stops the run now and keeps everything it has done. The card stays as Stopped · work kept, with ▶ Continue to carry on from there (or Dismiss).
- Abort undoes everything the run changed, and the project goes back to where it was.
The project page
A project's page has a stage stepper and its action bar on top, and these tabs (each appears once it applies):
| Tab | What it's for |
|---|---|
| Overview | The project at a glance: stage, stack, what it is and does, what it needs to run, where it runs, and the latest activity. |
| Vision | The full blueprint (or the Draft's text). |
| Revise | Draft and Blueprint: say how the vision should change, and Maria rewrites it in a quick pass. |
| Lab | Studio and Shipped: the chat with Maria and the prompts. See the Lab. |
| Preview | Studio and Shipped, for apps with a screen. See Previews. |
| Deploy | Shipped: where it runs on your cloud, and the app stores. |
| Secrets | Keys of outside services the app needs, from the workspace's vault. |
| Docs | Shipped: business, internal and client docs Maria writes into the repo. |
| Activity | Everything that happened, in plain words, newest first. |
Drop, restore, delete
- Drop moves a project to Dropped. Its code, repository and history stay.
- ↩ Restore puts it back at the stage it was at.
- 🗑 Delete forever removes the project, its prompts and its files on Neotexa. There's no undo. Its GitHub repository stays.