Getting started

This guide takes you from signing in to your first delivered plan. You'll create an organization, set up a model provider, file a request, and walk it through its first approval gate.

1. Sign in

Go to dev.forginate.com and sign in with GitHub. On first login Forginate creates a personal organization for you — every project, document, and invoice lives inside an organization.

2. Choose how models are paid for

Forginate's agents run on large language models. You have two options, configurable under Settings → Providers:

• Platform models (default). Forginate supplies the model credentials and meters your token usage to your plan. No setup needed.
• Bring your own keys. Add your own Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenAI-compatible API key. Token costs then go straight to your provider account with no markup — you pay Forginate only for the base plan. Use Test connection after adding a key to verify it works.

TIP

A default Anthropic provider is what the conversational document editor (the vibe editor) uses, so if you bring your own keys, add an Anthropic key and mark it as the org default.

See Billing for how metering and plans work.

3. File your first request

Click New request. You'll pick a request type:

• New project — build something from scratch. Full design loop, then ship.
• Import existing — reverse-engineer planning docs from an existing repo, then iterate.
• Import production — adopt a production app into maintenance mode.
• Feature / Change / Bug — these apply to products you've already shipped; they file a card on that project's Improve board instead of starting a new pipeline. See Improvement requests.

For your first run, choose New project, give it a title, and describe what you want built. Be as specific as you can about users, features, and constraints — the discovery phase will ask follow-up questions, but a strong initial description saves iterations.

4. Review the document plan

After intake, Forginate proposes a table of contents for your planning documents — the set of documents that will define your product, tailored to your project's kind and any compliance needs. You can:

• Add or remove sections before generation starts.
• See a cost estimate for generating the selected documents.
• Approve the TOC — nothing is generated until you do.

See Intake and discovery and Planning documents.

5. Review and approve documents

As planning documents are generated, they appear in your project's document tree. For each one you can:

• Read it and Approve the version, or Request changes with notes.
• Edit it directly, or chat with the vibe editor to revise it conversationally.
• Regenerate it if you want the agent to take another pass.

Approved documents gate the next phase: the build won't start until the plan is signed off.

6. Watch the build

Once planning is approved, build agents pick up tasks one by one. The Pipeline board shows your request advancing through Build → Integrate → Deliver, and each request's detail page shows live progress, per-run costs, and audit results. See Build and review and QA.

7. Ship it

When the build is delivered, set up a deploy target — your own Kubernetes cluster or a Forginate-provisioned AWS account — and create a deployment. Forginate plans the deployment, you approve the plan, and it goes live.

8. Keep improving

A delivered product isn't done. File features, changes, and bug fixes on the project's Improve board; each card is triaged by AI, planned, approved by you, built, QA'd, and merged. See Improvement requests.

Inviting your team

• Organization members are managed in Settings. Inviting someone to your org lets them create projects billed to your plan — it does not automatically grant access to existing projects.
• Project teams are managed per project, with viewer / editor (power user) / admin roles.
• Share links give external stakeholders read-only access to approved documents without a Forginate account.

See Teams and roles and Sharing.

Costs are real

Each pipeline phase spends model tokens. Watch the per-run cost readouts, and remember that runs have budget caps — a run that hits its cap pauses for your decision rather than spending indefinitely.