Overview

Welcome to Hatchik

Hatchik gives you a working app on its own URL within minutes, then gets out of the way so you can build the actual product with your AI tool of choice. These docs cover the bits that aren't obvious from the website — what's wired up, how to ship a change, and where to look when something breaks.

What Hatchik is

A ready-made software substrate. When you sign up, we provision a sandbox at yoursubdomain.hatchik.com with the boring infrastructure already wired in: sign-in by email, a Postgres database, file storage, transactional mail, payments in test mode, a mobile shell, and admin tooling. You get a private GitHub repo and an AI_CONTEXT.md file that any AI coding tool can read to understand the layout. You add your product on top.

Who it's for

Non-tech founders who can describe what they want clearly and are happy to drive a tool like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, Cline, Codex, or Antigravity. You don't need to know what a Dockerfile is, but you do need to be comfortable copying a magic-link email, opening a folder in a coding tool, and pressing Enter on a prompt. If you've ever opened ChatGPT, Gemini, or Grok and asked it to write something for you, you've already done the hardest bit.

The three core flows

1. Sign up

You go to hatchik.com, describe what you want to build in one line, get a magic-link email a few moments later, and click through. Behind the scenes we provision a full stack on Hetzner (auth, database, mail, the lot) and create a private GitHub repo under your account. Total time: a couple of minutes. No card needed for the Sandbox tier.

2. Build

Clone the repo (the welcome email tells you how), open it in your AI tool, and start a conversation about the first feature. The AI_CONTEXT.md file in the repo root tells your AI where the substrate ends and your product begins — so it edits the right files, doesn't break the plumbing, and knows your live sandbox URL. We've put a copy-paste-ready first prompt in AI tool setup.

3. Ship

git push. That's it. A webhook on your repo triggers Hatchik to pull, rebuild and restart your sandbox — usually within thirty seconds. Refresh your sandbox URL and your change is live. If your AI tool prefers to deploy directly without going via GitHub, it can POST to your per-tenant deploy endpoint instead. See Deploying changes for both.

Where to start

If this is your first time, read Getting started end to end. It walks you from the signup form through to a deployed first change, with the exact prompts to paste into your AI tool.

If you're already logged in and your sandbox is live, jump to AI tool setup for the per-tool wiring instructions, or Deploying changes to understand the push-to-deploy flow in detail.

What's not here

These docs cover Hatchik itself — the substrate, the deploy loop, account management. They do not cover how to build your specific product, or how to use Cursor / Windsurf / Claude Code / Cline / Codex / Antigravity in general. For that, your AI tool's own docs are better. We give you the foundation; what you build on it is up to you (and your AI tool).