Quick Start
From sign-up to approving your first AI-submitted record in about 5 minutes.
Quick Start
This guide takes you from zero to your first approval. By the end you'll have a workspace, a base, and you'll have approved an AI-submitted record from the Inbox — the core loop Busabase is built around.
Goal: approve your first record in ~5 minutes. Everything else — connecting agents, the REST API, variants — builds on this one loop.
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.
Sign up and land on your workspace
Create an account with email or OAuth. Busabase auto-creates your first workspace (named after your email handle) and drops you on the dashboard — no setup wizard required to get going.
A workspace is your top-level container for bases, members, and tokens. You can rename it or invite teammates later from Organizations & Teams.
Meet your first base
Your workspace ships with a starter base. A base defines one content type — its fields, types, and validation — exactly like a typed spreadsheet.
This is your canonical data: the rows here are approved records on the main branch. New edits never overwrite them; they arrive as change requests for review (next step).
Bases are made of typed fields — text, number, select, attachment, relation, and more. See Field Types for the full registry.
Open the Inbox
Head to the Inbox — the single queue where every submission waiting for review shows up. Your workspace comes pre-seeded with one sample record so you have something to approve right away.
The Inbox turns the AI firehose into a prioritized to-do list: each item is a change request (a branch of immutable commits) waiting for a human decision.
Review the record — diff, then decide
Click the sample item to open the record detail. You'll see the rendered preview, the field-by-field diff of what changed, and the commit history behind it. Nothing here is editable in place — every change is a new commit, so you always have a complete audit trail.
You have three moves:
- Approve — fast-forwards the record pointer to this commit. The change becomes canonical; no data is overwritten.
- Revise — leave a comment, or type
@AIto ask your agent to rework it (more on that below). - Reject — close the change request without merging.
Approve it 🎉
Click Approve. The record advances, the Inbox empties, and you've completed the full Busabase loop: submit → review → merge, with history intact.
From the empty Inbox you'll see two CTAs — Connect an agent and Get your API token. Pick whichever matches how you'll feed real content in next.
That's the whole product in one motion. Everything else just scales this loop up — more agents, more reviewers, more channels.
Feed in real content
Two ways to get beyond the sample record:
A. Submit via the API. Generate a scoped token from Settings → API Tokens, then have any system POST a record into your Inbox over the REST API at /api/v1. The Token settings page gives you ready-to-paste curl, Python, and Node snippets wired to your workspace. See API Tokens and the REST API guide.
B. Connect an agent. Busabase has no built-in model — you bring your own. Paste one prompt to point Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex at your workspace; it proposes records as change requests for you to approve, and a one-line npx skills add busabase/skills installs a permanent skill so it just knows Busabase every session. (Agents can also act as your in-app @AI revisor — typing @AI tighten this intro in a comment dispatches one.) See Bring Your Own Agent.
What you just learned
- A workspace holds your bases, members, and tokens.
- A base defines a content type; an approved record is the canonical row.
- Every edit is an immutable commit; a change request is a branch under review.
- Approving fast-forwards the record — a clean, diffable audit trail comes free.
Next steps
Keep going:
- Core Concepts — the git-shaped model, end to end.
- Change Requests — the review workflow in depth.
- Bring Your Own Agent — hand the wheel to Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex with one prompt.
- REST API — submit and read records programmatically.