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Quickstart

Connect your coding agents, invite your team, and give it a workspace.

This guide takes you from a new account to your team's agents in sync. Steps 3 to 5 can go in any order: your workspace home lists them under Get started and ticks each one off.

1. Sign up

CoDev is in public beta, and anyone can create an account. Go to Get started and either:

  • choose Continue with GitHub or Continue with Google, or
  • enter your Name, Email, and a Password, and choose Create account.

2. Verify your email

  • Google or GitHub: you're signed in right away.
  • Email and password: passwords need at least 10 characters with an uppercase letter, a lowercase letter, a number, and a special character. We then email you a link to verify your address. Open it and choose Verify email, and you're signed in.

Verifying your email adds $20 of starter credits to your account. See Credits and plans.

3. Connect your agents

You don't need to run any commands: your coding agent sets CoDev up for you. On CoDev's home page, choose Copy the setup prompt (or, under Get started, open Connect your agents and choose Copy prompt), then paste it into Claude Code, Codex or Cursor in your project's folder. Your agent:

  • asks which of Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and VS Code on this computer to connect, and whether to show their chats live in the CoDev workspaces they use (it connects nothing you don't choose);
  • installs the CoDev CLI (it needs Node.js 20 or newer; your agent helps you install it if it's missing) and shows you a link to sign in or create your account;
  • tells you what it connected and what's left for you: start a new Claude Code or Codex session to load CoDev, trust CoDev's hooks in Codex's /hooks, and click Sign In in Cursor's or VS Code's CoDev panel;
  • offers to add your project (step 4), and ends by showing you how to use CoDev.

Claude Code and Codex get CoDev already signed in and conflict warnings, in a plugin named codev that you can turn off or remove in /plugin (Claude Code) or /plugins (Codex 0.154 or later). Cursor gets conflict warnings, and Cursor and VS Code get CoDev's extension, which gives the editor's agent CoDev's tools once you sign in from its panel (see Use CoDev from VS Code or Cursor). Settings → Security lists each computer, the agents it connected and whether their chats show in CoDev, with Disconnect for each. Paste the prompt on every computer you code on. Not sure what's connected later? Ask your agent to check your CoDev setup. To run the commands yourself instead, see CoDev CLI.

To use CoDev from Claude or ChatGPT, see ChatGPT and Claude.

4. Add your project

A workspace is your project in the cloud, shared with your team: a machine with the code, the keys your agents need, and agents that keep working while laptops are closed.

Say yes when your agent offers to add your project during setup. To add one later, under Get started, open Add your project, choose Copy prompt and paste it into your agent in your project's folder.

Your agent uploads the files Git would commit, uncommitted changes included; ignored files, .env files and keys stay on your computer (up to 10,000 files and 100 MB, 4 MB a file). It gives you the workspace's link and an invite link. In a checkout of a GitHub repository, it first shows you a link to connect GitHub so the workspace links to the repository: the workspace's main is GitHub's commit your work started from, and your changes are one commit on a codev/ branch. See Put a project on CoDev.

That upload happens once: changes you make on your computer afterwards show in the workspace only after you link the folder. For a GitHub checkout, your agent asks whether to link it to the new workspace and links it on your yes (codev link), so the changes you keep making there show as your own worktree. Without it, your agent's chats still show there if you turned on chat mirroring, and conflict warnings still work.

Work on it from your agent (ask it to open your CoDev workspace, give the workspace's agent a task, or read, edit and run commands there; see Use CoDev from Claude Code or Codex), or in the browser, where a workspace is the CoDev IDE.

Already have a workspace with live main for this repository? Tell your agent, and it sets you up on that one instead of adding the project again. It then asks whether to link your folder to that workspace, since your work in progress would show there. After you say yes, your work in progress shows there as your own worktree while your agent works, and the team can run everyone's work together. See Show your work in live main.

To start one in the browser instead, choose Or start one in the browser under Add your project, or New workspace later: GitHub repository, or Blank workspace, which makes a new private repository on your GitHub for it (connect GitHub first for a repository; a blank workspace asks when it opens). A cold start can take a few minutes. To bring people in, choose Share in its top bar. See Create a workspace and Invite your team.

5. Invite your team

Your agents hear each other when you're on one CoDev team, or share a workspace. Under Get started, open Invite your team and choose Invite teammates. Enter a Team name (the first time), then type their Emails (separated by commas) and choose Send invites, or choose Copy invite link: anyone who opens it can join your team for 7 days, and New link replaces it. You can also do this from Settings → Team. Each teammate pastes the same setup prompt into their own agent. The invite link your agent gives you when it adds your project adds people straight to that workspace, as editors. A teammate who joins your workspace doesn't add the project again: their Get started shows Work on your team's project, whose prompt has their agent clone it, and their step is done once they run codev link in that clone. In a checkout of a repository that already has a workspace with live main they can edit, their agent points them there too.

From then on, while your agents work on the same repository, each one hears what the others are changing, and when their work would conflict, CoDev tells both which function conflicts so they fix it before anyone merges. See Coordinate with teammates' agents.

6. Run an agent in the workspace

Agents in a workspace use your own subscription or API key, or CoDev credits. The quickest start is Use my CoDev credits in an empty chat: Codex and Claude then run on your credits with no sign-in. To use your own account instead, connect your subscription from a terminal with codev codex-auth, codev claude-auth, or codev cursor-auth (see CLI), or open Settings → AI providers in the workspace and choose Other ways to connect → Use an API key instead. Save the API keys your agents need once under Settings → Environment Variables; see Environment variables.

Open the chat, pick your agent and model from the chip in the message box, and ask it to do something:

Run the app and open the preview.

Everyone in the workspace sees it work. When your dev server starts, open the Browser tab and pick its port from Dev servers, or type /preview 3000 in the chat. See Work with AI agents and Terminals and previews.

7. Push your work

When you're happy with a change, open the Changes tab, write a commit message, and choose Commit. With live main (the default), it shows in live main with everyone's work; mark your worktree ready and choose Ship at the top of the right-hand panel to open your pull request. See Live main and shipping. With live main off, choose Publish branch (or Push) and Open pull request; see Git, GitHub, and pull requests.

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