Your first app

You’ve installed Lodekit and connected your agent. Time to build something. This walkthrough uses a book log, but the shape works for any first app.

Pick something tiny

Your first app should be small enough to describe in one breath: track the books you’re reading, log your workouts, keep a list of movies to watch. Small apps arrive fast, and fast is what makes the loop click — describe, look, adjust.

Don’t worry about getting the idea perfect. Changing an app later is as cheap as asking.

What to say to your agent

Name the app, list what you want to record, and say how you want to see it:

Build me a Lodekit app called book-log: I want to log books with title,
author, and the date I finished, and see them newest-first.

That’s a complete brief. Your agent knows the rest — how a Lodekit app is put together, where the data should live — from the skill you connected.

What happens next

Your agent scaffolds the app through its Lodekit connection, then writes the code. You can watch from the outside:

• New files appear in apps/book-log/ inside your Lodekit folder.
• A book-log card appears on the dashboard, showing building….
• A moment later the card flips to ready.

If the build hits an error, the card says so — and your agent can read the error and fix it. You never touch the machinery.

Open it

Click the card on the dashboard, or go straight to http://lodekit.localhost:7777/book-log/. There’s your app: a real web page, running on your Mac, ready to log its first book.

Make it yours

The first version is a starting point, not a verdict. Ask for changes the same way you asked for the app:

• “Add a rating out of five to each book.”
• “Let me mark a book as abandoned.”
• “Show how many books I finished this year at the top.”

Each request follows the same rhythm: your agent edits the files, the card shows building…, and the change is live when it flips back to ready.

Where your books went

Every book you log lands in data/book-log/ in your Lodekit folder — sitting right beside the app’s source in apps/book-log/. Back up the folder and the app and its records travel together. More in Your Lodekit folder.

What to try next

Two easy upgrades show off what apps get for free:

• A settings knob. Ask for one — “let me choose how many books show per page” — and it appears in the dashboard’s Settings, no extra UI needed. See Settings.
• A weekly summary. Ask for “a task that adds a summary entry every Sunday of what I finished that week” and Lodekit runs it on schedule, even when the app isn’t open in your browser. See Tasks.

From here, the dashboard guide shows you around the control room, and the Services overview tours everything your apps can lean on.