Creating your first project

Choose a starting point, describe your product, and get an AI-generated project summary to build on. · Required

This is the entry point to the whole journey. It walks you from the dashboard to a reviewed project summary — the foundation every downstream generation builds on. If you'd rather begin from a ready-made foundation, see Starting from a template instead.

Step 1: Choose how to start

From the dashboard, click Create Your First Project — or the Create New Project card, once you have projects. VibeMap first asks How would you like to start? with two options:

• Start from an idea — describe your product and let the AI generate the full spec from your prompt. Best for new projects and early-stage ideas.
• Start from existing code — connect your IDE to VibeMap via the MCP server and let your AI coding agent scan your codebase and reverse-engineer it into structured specs. Best when a codebase already exists. Connecting over MCP is open on every plan, Free included; what your plan gates is which parts of the spec your agent may author — pages and schema need Starter or above. Full nuance in Two ways to generate.

You can use both flows later — they populate the same project. The rest of this page follows Start from an idea; for the code-first path see Connect your IDE.

Figure: Choose how to start.

Step 2: Fill in the project details

The Create New Project form has two fields.

Project name

A short, descriptive name — this is how the project appears in your dashboard and throughout the app.

• Keep it concise (2–5 words).
• Use the product name if you have one, or a descriptive label.
• Examples: "TaskFlow", "Recipe Sharing App", "Freelancer CRM".

Project description (prompt)

The most important field. Write a natural-language description of the product you want to build — the AI uses it as the foundation for everything it generates. The field arrives pre-filled with a template that prompts you to cover:

• What the app does — its core purpose and what users accomplish.
• Who it's for — the target users and their roles.
• Core features — the 3–5 main things users can do.
• What problems it solves — the pain points it addresses.
• Any specific requirements — stack, integrations, or unusual workflows (optional).

You don't need to be exhaustive — a few well-written paragraphs beat a vague essay. See Writing effective prompts for detailed guidance and worked examples.

💡 Tip: You don't pick a model here — VibeMap chooses one for you, and for a first summary that's a fast economy model, which is exactly what this step wants. On Pro and above a model selector appears next to Create Project, so you can send a complex or high-stakes generation to a stronger model.

Step 3: Submit and wait for generation

Click Create Project. The AI pipeline analyses your prompt and generates a project summary — a structured overview capturing your product's goals, target audience, value proposition, and scope. This usually takes 15–30 seconds; a progress indicator runs while it works. When it finishes, you're taken into the project.

Step 4: Take the first-visit tour

On your very first project, a short three-step tour spotlights the layout you'll use everywhere:

1. Your project journey — the four-phase nav (Research → Plan → Prepare → Develop); the dots show what's already generated.
2. Always know the next step — the progress strip tracks the journey and points at the single best next action.
3. Meet your agent — the conversational agent can run generations, edit your spec, and answer questions; reference anything by its code. The tour introduces it on every plan, but the agent itself is Starter and above.

The tour appears once per browser. Dismiss it any time with Skip or the ×.

Step 5: Review the project summary

The summary is the AI's interpretation of your idea, organised into clear sections — overview, target audience, core value proposition, key goals, and scope.

Figure: Project summary.

Review it carefully — it sets the direction for every downstream generation. If the AI misread something:

• Edit the summary directly to correct any misinterpretation.
• Regenerate it if the overall direction is off.
• Refine your prompt and start a new project if it's badly wrong.

Getting the summary right is worth the time: it cascades into better personas, features, and everything else. Full detail in Project summary.

Step 6: Generate the rest of the spec

With the summary confirmed, work through the journey. The sidebar and the progress strip recommend the order (green dots mark completed steps):

1. Business case — live-web-research market validation (Research phase; optional but recommended).
2. Personas — target user profiles.
3. Features — core product functionality.
4. User stories — requirements from the user's perspective.
5. Acceptance criteria — testable definitions of done (derived from features and stories).
6. Pages & sections — UI structure and routes.
7. Database schema — data model and relationships (pages first: page layouts give the schema generator better context).

Each step builds on the ones before it, so generating in order produces the most coherent result — but it's a loop, not a line: once pages exist you can cross-check acceptance criteria against them to close gaps. When the spec is complete, run Prepare for Dev to consolidate it into a build-ready blueprint.

Steps 2–5 run on any plan, Free included. Pages and schema (6–7) need Starter or above; the business case (1) and Prepare for Dev need Pro or above — see Account and billing.

Step 7: Hand off to your AI coding agent

Once the spec is in shape — features approved, acceptance criteria reviewed — connect your IDE's AI coding agent (Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, VS Code Copilot) to VibeMap over MCP. Your agent picks up work one acceptance criterion at a time, implements it in your codebase, and submits for review. Full walkthrough → Handoff overview.

⚡ Power-user hints

• Let the agent drive (Starter and above). Instead of clicking each generation, ask the conversational agent to run them ("generate personas, then features"). Its suggested-action chips always offer the right next step.
• Or let your own agent drive, on any plan. Connect an IDE agent over MCP and it can author the spec straight into the project on your tokens — see Two ways to generate.
• Don't skip the summary review. Two minutes fixing the summary saves regenerating every downstream artifact later.
• Experiment freely. Every generation is versioned — regenerate as often as you like and revert if a version was better.

↔ The traditional way

Kicking off a project by hand means a discovery workshop, a PM writing a brief, and a first PRD draft circulated for review — often a week before anyone agrees on scope. VibeMap compresses that into a single form and a 30-second generation, then keeps the resulting summary editable so you refine direction in place rather than in a doc thread.

What's next

• Writing effective prompts — sharpen your description for better output.
• Generating personas — the next step in the journey.