Quickstart
New here? Start with What is Squadboard? and Key Concepts first.
The shortest path through Squadboard. In about ten minutes you will:
- Create your first project.
- Confirm the team that will pick up work.
- Capture a work idea and shape it into a card.
- Move the card to Ready and watch Squadboard pick it up automatically.
- Inspect the run.
- Run a ceremony to close the loop.
This is the same workflow loop the tutorials walk through in detail. Do the quickstart first to get the shape; do the tutorials when you want to understand each step deeply.
If Squadboard is not installed yet, do Installation first.
1. Create your project
Open Squadboard. On the Projects page, create a new project (e.g., MyProject) and point it at a repository folder. If the folder already has .squad/, Squadboard reads it; if not, choose the Default Software Project template and it will scaffold the basics.
Open your project. The dashboard is the cockpit — confirm the repository path is right before you move anything.
2. Confirm the team
Open Agents. Every agent needs a name, a role, and a charter — those are what the coordinator uses to assign work, not the name alone.
If a role is missing, click Cast Team and accept the proposal. Five minutes here saves bad assignments later.
3. Capture and shape a card
Open the Board. You should see five columns: Backlog → Ready → In Progress → In Review → Done.
Click Create issue and fill in a card. Title it with a concrete outcome; write a body that explains user impact and what evidence to link when the work is done.
Example body:
Write a short guide that explains how Squadboard relates to upstream Squad
and how to get started. Link the published guide when done.
Save. The card lands in Backlog.
4. Move to Ready — pickup is automatic
Drag the card from Backlog into Ready. This is the only step that triggers execution.
When the card enters Ready, Squadboard runs deterministic gates, picks the best agent from the roster you reviewed in step 2, creates an issue run, and starts it. The card moves into In Progress under the runtime's control. There is no separate play button.
5. Inspect the run
Click the card. The right-hand panel shows the issue run: which agent picked it up, the prompt context, the model output, and any tool calls.
Use this to confirm three things: the right agent was chosen, the prompt included the context you expected, and the output matches the outcome you wrote in step 3. If the assignment was wrong, fix the role or charter in Agents — do not override the assignment by hand.
6. Close the loop with a ceremony
Open Ceremonies and run the default launch-review ceremony. The ceremony walks its workflow steps (route → agent_run → approve), summarizes the runs you just produced, and records the handoff.
That's the full loop: capture → shape → Ready → pickup → run → review.
Where to go next
- Do the tutorials for each step in depth.
- Wire Copilot CLI and GitHub to your project via Tutorial 4.
- Read Board and Runs to understand the pickup and run lifecycle in detail.