Quickstart

Five minutes from "I just signed up" to a live preview at a public URL. This walkthrough covers the path most users take on day one — no detours.

1. Sign up

Head to swarmz.net and click Sign in. Authentication runs through BoostedHost OAuth, so if you already have a BoostedHost account you're one click in. New users get a free tier on creation: 50 monthly credits, room for one project, and 5 bonus credits that refill every day. No credit card required.

2. Create your first project

Once you land on the dashboard, the prompt box in the center of the page is your project starter. There's no separate "create" form to fill out — you describe the app you want, hit send, and Swarmz handles the rest.

1. Type your first prompt into the box. Be concrete — "a kanban board with three columns and drag-to-reorder" beats "a task app".
2. Hit Enter (or click the send arrow).
3. Swarmz auto-generates a project name from your prompt (a short, lowercase, hyphenated slug like kanban-board), creates the project under your active workspace, and provisions a container.
4. The dashboard shows a brief launch animation, then drops you into the editor at /editor/{projectId}.

The default framework is Web App — React 18 + Vite + TypeScript + Tailwind CSS + React Router, with a clean shadcn-style starter. If you want a different stack (Next.js, Astro, Vue), pick one from the Templates tab on the dashboard instead — the agent will scaffold against that template's starter files.

3. Watch the agent work

Inside the editor, the chat panel shows the agent reading files, planning the change, and writing code. You'll see live events as it goes:

• reading_files — the agent is pulling context from your codebase
• step_start / step_done — each phase of execution
• file_write — a file just got created or edited
• snapshot_created — a version checkpoint just landed

For multi-file changes the agent enters Plan mode automatically: it lists every file it intends to create, edit, or delete, and waits for you to approve before writing a single line. You can toggle Plan mode on for any prompt if you want a preview first — useful when you're not sure a request is well-scoped.

Each action draws from your credit balance: a simple edit is 1 credit, a feature implementation is 3, a complex change is 5, plan generation is 2, and the initial scaffold is 10. The credit widget in the editor toolbar updates after every run.

4. Preview your app

Every project gets a live preview at a unique subdomain: https://your-project-id.swarmz.cloud. The preview tab is open by default and refreshes automatically as the agent edits files — Vite's HMR pushes changes the instant they're saved, so you see the running app evolve in real time.

A few things to know about the preview container:

• It runs on Swarmz's K3s cluster — a real Node environment, not a stubbed sandbox.
• It hibernates after 10 minutes of inactivity to keep things cheap.
• Waking takes a few seconds — open the editor and the container provisions itself before you start typing.
• Resize the preview with the device toggles (desktop / tablet / mobile) in the toolbar.

If something looks broken, click the Code tab to inspect the file the agent just changed, or jump to the Terminal tab to run commands directly inside the container (/workspace is your project root).

5. Iterate

Keep prompting. Every prompt builds on the last — the agent has full context of your project files, your conversation history, and any skills you've enabled.

Snapshots are automatic. After every run that writes files, Swarmz commits the change to a git history persisted on your container's PVC. Open the Version History panel to:

1. Scroll through every snapshot with the diff inline
2. Preview an older version live (the URL changes to a snapshot-specific subdomain)
3. Restore to that snapshot in one click — your current state is itself snapshotted before the rollback, so nothing is lost

6. Ship it

When you're ready to go from "preview" to "real":

1. Connect GitHub — open project Settings → Git, link your GitHub account, and pick a repo (or let Swarmz create one). Two-way sync keeps your code in lockstep.
2. Publish to production — hit the Publish button in the editor toolbar. Swarmz builds your app and serves it at a stable production URL, separate from the dev preview.
3. Attach a custom domain — Settings → Domains. Add your domain, point a CNAME at cdn.swarmz.cloud, and Swarmz issues a TLS certificate automatically. DNS usually propagates in 1–10 minutes.

That's it. You went from sign-up to deployed app, and your daily bonus credits already refilled while you were reading.

Where to next