Your project view
The live preview page your assistant hands you — what is on screen, how the shareable link works, and what you can do without leaving it.
When your assistant creates a project it gives you a link to your project view. It is a live view of the app being built: the preview updates as writes land, and your data, services, checkpoints, and the Publish button are all on the same screen. There is nothing to type at here — you describe changes in your assistant, and watch them arrive.
The live preview
The preview runs your app as it stands right now — the same code your users will get, just not published yet. Writes stream in while your assistant works, so you do not need to reload.
If a change has been saved but the preview has not caught up, a small Updating preview… pill appears in the tab row. It clears on its own once the new build renders; it only shows up when the preview is genuinely more than a couple of seconds behind.
Use the device picker at the right of the tab row to switch between Desktop, iPhone (393 × 852), Pixel (412 × 915), iPad (820 × 1180), and a resizable Responsive frame; any of them can be rotated. Fullscreen gives you a bigger view but always renders at desktop width. On a phone-sized browser window the device picker is hidden and the preview fills the screen.
Press Cmd + K or Cmd + P (Ctrl on Windows), or click the search button in the tab row, to jump the preview to a page — or to a component, which renders its examples.
What to check while you are here:
- Walk your real user flows — sign up, sign in, and the main thing the app is for
- Check a phone frame as well as desktop before you call something done
- Confirm that forms and buttons actually save, rather than just looking right
Pointing at something in the preview
Two tools sit in the preview toolbar, at the right end of the tab row:
- Select
- Click any element in the preview to point at it. Floot maps it back to the source file and line.
- Annotate
- Take a screenshot of the preview and draw on it. Circling the problem is usually faster than describing it.
Both are held for your assistant rather than sent anywhere immediately. It picks up your current selection and annotation the next time it checks your context, so you can circle something and then just say "fix this". Floot also copies a paste-ready line to your clipboard when a selection lands, in case you would rather paste it in. If your assistant does not seem to have noticed, ask it to check your Floot context.
Annotations do not last forever
A drawn annotation is kept for about a day, then expires. If your assistant reports that an annotation has expired, draw it again. Annotate mode also closes itself when a write arrives, since the drawing sits on a frozen screenshot — your drawing is kept.
Services
The Services tab covers everything behind the app. It lists every service, with the ones your project already uses first, so you can also see what is available before your app uses it:
- Database
- Browse your Postgres tables, search them, add rows, and download a full export of the database.
- Integrations
- The connected services behind your app — API keys, OAuth providers, external databases.
- Storage, Email, Notifications
- Files your app stores, a log of the email it sent, and push-notification setup.
- Schedules, Analytics, SEO, AI
- Jobs that run on a timer, traffic for your published app, search-engine settings, and the usage and settings for AI features running inside your app.
- Plans & Docs
- Markdown your assistant wrote under
static/__dev/— plans, notes, decisions. Files under that prefix are excluded from your production build, so they are a safe place to keep working notes.
The Database and Email icons on the tab itself are shortcuts straight into those two.
On a phone
The tab row is replaced by a bar along the bottom: Preview, Activity (the checkpoint timeline), Data, Email, and More for the rest of the services.
Checkpoints and undoing changes
Open the Checkpoint panel from the tab row. It is a newest-first timeline of checkpoints, the individual changes grouped under each one, and the times your app was published. Expand a checkpoint to see what changed in it; filter the list down to your own checkpoints, your assistant's, raw changes, or publishes.
Restore rolls the project back to the state before that point, behind a confirmation step. Add a checkpoint yourself from that panel before a risky change, or ask your assistant to save one — it has a checkpoint tool of its own, and checkpoints it creates are labelled with its name.
The project menu
The project name at the top left opens the project menu.
- Project Settings
- Project name, project icon (used for the favicon and the mobile app icon), a system prompt of standing instructions, a design prompt for brand direction, and project visibility. Projects are private by default, including free ones.
- Collaborators
- Give other Floot accounts access to the project.
- Duplicate
- Make a copy of the project to experiment on. This is a paid-plan feature.
- Get Code
- Download the whole project source as a zip. This is a paid-plan feature — see Self-hosting.
Keep the system prompt short. It is included with every change your assistant makes.
Sharing the link
The preview link your assistant hands you is not restricted to people who can sign in to your project. It carries a token in the URL: it opens with no Floot login, expires after seven days, and is scoped to that one project.
It is read-and-interact only. Someone holding the link can open the app and use it, but cannot edit your files, change your settings, or touch your account. If a link gets out, every outstanding link for that project can be revoked at once.
The token never takes anything away from you: if you open the link while signed in to Floot, the page uses your real access instead, and you keep full edit and publish rights.
The project menu also has Send Development Preview, which emails a per-recipient link that is checked against that email address when it is opened. It is a paid-plan feature and only the project owner can send it. For sharing your published app, see Sharing your projects.
Preview vs. published
| View | What it shows | Who can see it |
|---|---|---|
| Preview | Your latest changes, before you publish | You, your collaborators, and anyone you send a preview link to |
| Published | The last version you published | Anyone with the published link |
The Publish button is in the top-right corner — or just ask your assistant to publish, which runs the same deploy and returns the same URL. Floot runs an error check first and stops with the problems if it finds any. After the first publish, new changes stay in preview until you publish again.
Published means public
Anyone with the link can open your published app. If you want it restricted, ask your assistant to add authentication to the app.
If Publish asks you to upgrade
Some accounts need a paid plan before they can publish. If Publish asks you to upgrade, see Billing, credits, and plans.
Things only you can do
Most work happens through your assistant, but a few things need you in the Floot web app. Your assistant can walk you to them; it cannot finish them for you:
- Plans and billing live on floot.com, on your account's plan page. Your assistant cannot change what you pay.
- A custom domain is added from the Publish dialog, once the app has a subdomain — see How to add a custom domain.
- Native mobile builds are a switch in the same Publish dialog, on the Power plan — see Creating mobile apps.
- Your own API keys go through the secure connect link Floot generates when your assistant asks for one. Open it and enter the key there. Never paste a key into the chat — your assistant only ever receives the environment variable name, never the value.