Getting started

Go to hatchik.com and scroll to the "Get started" section. Fill in three fields: your first name, your email, and one line about what you want to build.

Screenshot: signup form on hatchik.com

Keep the description specific. "A meal-prep app for personal trainers, called PrepSheet" works much better than "a fitness app". Your AI tool will see this later as part of the first-prompt template, so a concrete idea seeds the conversation properly.

Click Start my Sandbox. You'll see a confirmation message — we're now provisioning your stack in the background. This takes one to two minutes.

Check the inbox you used. You'll get an email titled "Your Hatchik sandbox is ready" from hello@hatchik.com. Open it.

Screenshot: welcome email with magic link

The email has three things you'll use right away: your sandbox URL (something like prepsheet.hatchik.com), the magic link to sign in, and the git clone command for your private repo.

Click the magic link in the email. It'll open your sandbox URL signed in as the owner. You should see a stock landing page from the substrate template — nothing custom yet, that's fine.

Screenshot: default sandbox landing page

This URL is now yours. The Postgres database, file storage, mail sender, payments-in-test, and admin tools are all already wired up behind it. You only need to add the product.

The welcome email contains a git clone command — copy and run it in your terminal.

git clone git@github.com:yourname/prepsheet-hatchik.git
cd prepsheet-hatchik

You'll find the repo under your own GitHub account, not ours. The remote is yours. The code is yours.

Inside, you'll see a top-level file called AI_CONTEXT.md. That's the file every AI tool needs to read first — it explains which files belong to the substrate (don't edit) and which belong to your product (edit freely), and it includes your sandbox URL plus a per-tenant deploy token.

Open the folder you just cloned in your AI tool of choice. For most tools — Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Cline, Codex, Antigravity — that's the same as opening a project folder in VS Code.

If you're not sure which tool to use, or you want the per-tool wiring instructions (especially for ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, or Perplexity Comet in a browser, which need an explicit file upload), see AI tool setup.

Now the fun bit. Paste the first-prompt template into your AI tool's chat. The exact wording is in your AI_CONTEXT.md file (search for "First-prompt template"), but it looks like this:

I want to build PrepSheet. The idea is: "a meal-prep app for personal trainers". This repo is a Hatchik substrate — auth, database, hosting and email are already wired up. The live sandbox is at https://prepsheet.hatchik.com and the Supabase anon key is in AI_CONTEXT.md. Read AI_CONTEXT.md, then help me design the first feature: a minimal user-facing flow that proves the core value. Put new UI under apps/web/src/product/ and new API routes under apps/api/src/product/. Don't touch the substrate files.

The AI will read AI_CONTEXT.md, get its bearings, and either propose a plan or start writing code. Let it draft. Review what it suggests, push back where the idea doesn't match what you want, accept the rest.

When you're happy with the first commit's worth of changes, tell your AI tool one of these phrases:

• "Ship it"
• "Push this"
• "Deploy"

The AI_CONTEXT.md file has explicit instructions for the AI to run git push (or POST your deploy token directly) when you say any of those. You shouldn't need to open a terminal.

Open your sandbox URL again (or refresh the tab). Within about thirty seconds of the push, your change is live. If you've added a new page, navigate to it. If you've tweaked the homepage, you'll see it.

Screenshot: sandbox showing the customer's first change live

That's the whole loop. From here on, it's: chat with your AI, accept changes, say "ship it", refresh. Repeat until you have a product worth showing someone.