Quick start

Five minutes from sign-up to your first prompt copied into Claude Code. No credit card, no install step, no boilerplate to delete later.

Go to vibstr.app and hit Start 14-day free trial — no credit card. Email, password, display name. During the trial:

Unlimited projects
Unlimited items, plans, builds
30 AI calls per day (more than enough for one or two solo features)
Full search across everything you have ever logged

We do not ask for a card. The trial includes a $1 USD AI budget (covers ~100 typical Haiku calls — plenty to evaluate the per-item AI sidebar). After the 14-day trial, every deterministic feature stays free (capture, plans, ship items, Slack bridge, drawer, search, Activity, comments, GitHub linking) — Free tier supports 1 active project. AI features pause unless you BYO your Anthropic key (you pay Anthropic, not us — we never mark up AI compute) or upgrade to Pro at $2.99/seat/month for unlimited active projects + team members.

2. Create your first project

After sign-in you will land on an empty board. Open the avatar menu in the top right, click Settings, then + New Project in the project list at the top of the L1 column. Give it a name. That is it. The slug is auto-derived and not exposed in any route, so do not stress about it.

A project is a container for items, builds, members, areas, categories, labels, and prompt templates. Most people have one project per repo. Some have one per client. Vibstr does not care which.

3. Pick categories (or do not)

Every project ships with four sensible defaults:

Bug — something is broken
Change — you want it to behave differently
Task — a unit of work that is neither
Note — a thought you do not want to lose

Five is the cap. You can rename them, change the icon, change the colour, drag to reorder — but the moment you exceed five, stop and ask whether you really need a fifth, or whether you are reaching for the kind of taxonomy that breaks teams over six months. The answer is almost always "no, just use a label." Labels (project → admin → Labels) are project-scoped and multi-select per item, which covers most of what people reach for "another category" to do.

To edit the category set: avatar menu → Settings → pick your project in L1 → Categories in L2.

4. Log a few items

The capture strip is the thing across the top of the board. It has two states.

Collapsed (the default) is a single text input that says What needs doing?. Type one line, press Enter, the item creates with the project's default category and status. This is the path for "I am about to forget this." Do not overthink it.

Expanded is what happens when you click into the input. You get a row of small dropdown chips: Type, Area, Build, Assignee, Due, Estimate, Labels, plus a priority flag. None of them are required. Pick the ones you actually need today and ignore the others — there is no points-vs-hours holy war happening here.

[ Bug ▼ ]  [ Login screen ▼ ]  [ Build v1.4.2 ▼ ]  [ Mine ▼ ]  ⚑
[ Description — markdown OK, Cmd+Enter to save ]
                                                                [ Add ]

A useful starting set for a real project:

The bug you have actually been ignoring. That intermittent thing on the login flow that you keep forgetting to write down.
One change you have been putting off. Renaming a field, tightening some copy, the unbranded favicon.
One task that is not a bug or a change. "Add a smoke test for the Plans tab," or "write the README for the new module."

That is enough for the next step.

5. Copy your first prompt

Once you have three or four items on the board, click the Copy Prompt button in the actions row above the filter pills. The button label is context-aware — it says "Copy Open (3)" if your filter is on Open, "Copy Bugs (2)" if you have filtered to Bugs, and so on. If you have selected specific items via the checkbox affordance, it copies just those.

Vibstr assembles a clean, no-fluff prompt: a header, every item as a --- delimited block, and a footer. No "Hey Claude" preamble, no apologies, no "STOP:" theatrics. Paste it into Claude Code and read what comes out.

The prompt format is project-tunable from Settings → Prompt templates if you want to add house style, but the defaults are deliberately minimal so you can ship without touching them.

6. Optional: invite a teammate

If you are not solo, invite someone now while the project is still small.

Settings → project → Members → + Invite. Email, role (owner / editor / viewer), generated link. The free tier permits up to 3 members per project; Pro lifts the cap to unlimited. Send the link manually for now — we do not auto-mail invites until Phase 9.

When the invitee signs up, they land on the project as their first project. That is the welcome flow until the proper onboarding rebuild.

What is next

You have a project, items, a prompt. The next move is the one that turns this from a notes app into a tracker the AI talks to: copy one master snippet from Settings → PROJECT → Connect Claude Code, paste it into your Claude Code chat, tell Claude to add it to your CLAUDE.md. After that, every build prompt drives the loop automatically — plans first, items derived, commits with closes #NN, build reports posted.

Now connect Claude Code →

If you want to skip ahead and read about the plan-driven workflow that actually drives the Vibstr roadmap, the Plans page is there too — but you will get more out of it after the Claude Code page lands.