Prepare for Development

The step that turns a reviewed spec into a build-ready blueprint — and tells you whether your project is actually done. · Required

Once your spec is in shape — features, user stories, acceptance criteria, pages, and schema — Prepare for Development is where you make it buildable. It runs the deep analysis a coding agent needs and gives you a single, honest "ready to build" signal. Do this before you hand off or build in-app.

What Prepare does

Open the Prepare page from the project sidebar. It's a single, map-centric workspace that reads top to bottom:

1. The Prepare for Development control (an animated empty state before your first run; a compact status + regenerate view after).
2. Status banners — the green ready to build banner or an amber flagged items banner.
3. The Blueprint Preview Map — the constant review surface (full guide → 10.3 The Blueprint Preview Map).

Run Prepare for Development

Click Prepare for Development (Pro+). VibeMap first runs a spec-coverage pre-step that derives any missing acceptance criteria from your features and binds each page's empty / error / loading UI states to them. Then it fans out four analysis pipelines in parallel:

Your Foundation stack (auth, payments, email, and so on) is derived automatically as part of the run — there's no separate proposal to approve. Live per-pipeline progress streams in the agent-chat sidebar with a status dot and deep link for each pipeline.

💡 Tip: On Pro+ you can pick the model for the run from the button's model picker. Free/Starter runs fall back to each pipeline's pinned default.

The coverage preflight

Before a full run actually starts, VibeMap checks your spec for gaps — pages that don't bind to data, features without criteria, and similar. If it finds any, a coverage preflight dialog opens listing each gap grouped by type, with a Fix button per item and a Fix all per group that generate the missing assets for you.

You can close it to fix gaps first, or click Proceed anyway — the run works either way, but fewer gaps mean a richer blueprint for your agent to build from.

⚠️ Watch out: Gaps aren't errors. A page with no data contract might genuinely be static. Use your judgement — "Proceed anyway" is a valid choice.

Handle flagged items

Some rows can't be resolved automatically (an interaction the model couldn't map cleanly, a permission edge case). These surface as an amber "N items need your review" banner. Click Review to open the flagged-items dialog and approve or clear each interaction and state-machine row.

If a pipeline fails, a Retry card appears that re-runs only the failed pipelines — already-completed work is preserved.

Are you ready to build?

"Ready to build" isn't one switch — it's three things being true at once. VibeMap surfaces the combined signal as a green banner on the Prepare page:

Your spec is signed off — coverage is clear and everything flagged is resolved.

When all three hold, the green banner shows a Go to Develop button. On the Development page, the Plan, Hand off, and Track tabs each carry a small status dot (grey → amber → green) so you can read the rest of the journey at a glance.

⚡ Power user: The three checks are database-backed and update live — you can leave the Prepare page open in a second tab as a readiness dashboard while you fix gaps elsewhere.

⚡ Power-user hints

• Regenerate is incremental. After the first run the button becomes a compact status + regenerate control — re-running only re-derives what changed.
• Retry, don't restart. A single failed pipeline never forces a full re-run; use the retry card.
• Coverage lens on the map. The Blueprint Preview Map's coverage lens shows the same gaps the preflight flags, but visually — a red ring on a node is a gap you can jump straight to.

↔ The traditional way

What's next

• See what will be built → 10.3 The Blueprint Preview Map
• Group the work into sprints → 10.2 Sprint planning
• Hand off to your coding agent → 11.1 Handoff overview