Getting started

Sapient runs your company. You describe the product; a factory of AI seats — a Chief of Staff, a product manager, engineers, a designer, support, marketing, finance — specs it, builds it, ships it, and keeps it running. You approve the decisions that matter.

This is the documentation for everything you touch from the outside: the setup flow, the CLI, the connectors that let your factory reach your real accounts, and the two public APIs.

1. Get an account

Sapient is invite-only during the design-partner phase. Request access at sapient.works and you’ll get an email when a seat opens.

2. Create your factory

Sign in at app.sapient.works. First run drops you into an eight-step wizard — it takes a few minutes, and it’s resumable: close the tab and come back where you left off.

1. Are you building software? If not, tell us what you are building and we’ll skip the repository steps.
2. Existing repositories? Connect what you have, create something new, or decide later.
3. Product name and a one-line mission. One sentence. “A time-tracking app for design studios” is enough to start.
4. Structure. Monorepo or a repo per surface, and which surfaces exist — frontend, backend, iOS, Android.
5. Connect your code. Install the GitHub App on your org and pick (or create) a repository per surface. Nothing is pasted; see GitHub.
6. Set up your product spec. Either import from your codebase — the factory reads the repo you just connected and writes a spec from what’s actually there — or write one from a description. This is the step that matters most: the spec is the source of truth every seat works from, so everything downstream inherits its quality.
7. Summary. Confirm the product, the structure, and the repositories.
8. Say hello to your Chief of Staff. Optional, and the best thing you can do next.

3. Work the setup checklist

Home shows a checklist of what your factory still needs to be able to finish work rather than just start it — a version-control connector, a deployment target, a database backend, billing credits, and enough seats. Each item links straight to the screen that closes it. A factory can run with gaps; it will tell you plainly what it can’t do because of them.

4. Talk to your Chief of Staff

The Chief of Staff is the seat you actually talk to. It’s the one that knows the whole company: what’s in flight, what’s blocked, what needs you. Open it from the drawer in any screen, or from the terminal:

sapient chat

Ask for things the way you’d ask a competent colleague — “what shipped this week?”, “get the signup flow working on mobile”, “why is the deploy stuck?” It routes work to the right seats and comes back to you when a decision needs a human.

5. Approve the things that need you

Some actions never happen without a human: deploys, spending, outbound email, pricing changes, legal, hiring, and product-spec changes. They collect in Approvals on the web, in the iOS app, and in sapient approvals list. Nothing sits in the dark — an approval tells you what it will do and what it costs.

Where to go next

API keys	Publishable vs secret keys — which one you need, and how to keep them safe
Bug reporting API	Catch runtime errors on your site and collect user feedback
Contacts API	Add contacts to your CRM from your own backend
Errors and limits	The error shape, rate limits, and retry behavior both APIs share
CLI	Run your company from the terminal
Connectors	GitHub, Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, Slack