Quick Start

From sign-up to your first agent-written records in about 5 minutes, with a message, a diff, and a history behind each one.

This guide takes you from zero to a workspace your agent can work in. By the end you'll have a connected agent and a Base with its first records, and you'll know where to see the history behind each one.

Goal: your first agent-written records in ~5 minutes. Everything else — templates, skills, apps, the REST API — builds on this same workspace.

Before you start

You only need a Busabase Cloud account. There's nothing to install. If you'd rather run locally, the open-source, local-first edition lives at github.com/busabase/busabase — the concepts below are identical.

Want to look around before signing up? Open the interactive demo — it's a fully seeded workspace, no account required.

Create an account with email or OAuth. Busabase auto-creates your first workspace, shows a short welcome explaining how it works, and drops you on the workspace's Home when you choose Enter dashboard.

A workspace is your top-level container for data, docs, skills, apps, members, and tokens. You can rename it or invite teammates later from Teams, Members & Groups.

Connect your agent

A new workspace starts empty, and Home offers three ways to fill it: Connect your agent, Start from a template, or Create a Base or document.

Choose Connect your agent and paste the prompt into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or another coding agent. Busabase has no built-in model: you bring your own, and the prompt walks it through signing in and installing the Busabase skill. See Get Started with Agents for each client.

Ask it for real work

Give your agent something you'd otherwise lose in a chat, such as:

Create a Base for customer calls in Busabase, then log today's calls from my notes.

A Base defines one content type — its fields, types, and validation — exactly like a typed spreadsheet. The agent shows you the planned shape, waits for your go-ahead, then creates the Base and its first records.

A Base's records grid — the rows your agent wrote

Bases are made of typed fields — text, number, select, attachment, relation, and more. See Field Types for the full registry.

See the history behind a record

Open the Base in the sidebar and click a row's first cell. Next to the record's values you'll find its Lineage (who proposed it and who authored the commit) and its history. New edits never overwrite a record in place: each one is a new commit, carried by a change request with a message and a diff.

Record detail with its lineage and history

Come back with the next task

Close the session and start another one, with this agent or a different one, and ask it to build on what's there:

Read the customer calls in Busabase and draft the follow-ups for this week.

The next agent reads the same Base instead of starting from nothing. That's the loop: read what's there → do the work → leave the result in the workspace.

Decide what waits for a person (optional)

An agent's change merges right away when its credential has write access. If you want a person to check certain work first, give that agent a proposal-only (changeRequest) key from Account → API Keys. Its changes then wait for you:

Home shows Waiting for your review, and the same item is in the Inbox.
Open it to see the field-by-field diff, then Approve, Request changes, or Close change request.
An approved change is Approved · ready to merge, but nothing has changed yet. Find it under Approved and click Merge into Base.

An agent's change waiting for a decision

See API keys for the permission levels and Change Requests for the full lifecycle.

What you just learned

A workspace holds your data, docs, skills, apps, members, and tokens.
A base defines a content type; a merged record is the current row.
Every edit is an immutable commit; a change request is what carries it.
Merging — right away with write access, or after approval when you asked for it — fast-forwards the record, so a diffable audit trail comes free.

Next steps

Keep going:

Bring Your Own Agent — hand the wheel to Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex with one prompt.
Templates — start from a working setup instead of an empty workspace.
Core Concepts — the git-shaped model, end to end.
REST API — submit and read records programmatically.

Quick Start

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