Your first session
With a credential and a connected controller, everything else is ordinary — and you already have a project to launch into.
1. Open Scratchpad
Projects → Scratchpad. It was created at signup as a place to start immediately: no repository attached, nothing to configure. → What signup creates
You do not have to create a project first. If you would rather start from your own code, you can — that needs a Git connection — but it is not the shortest path to seeing the platform work.
2. Launch a sandbox
From the project, launch a sandbox: a container with a coding agent in it, created for you to work in interactively and thrown away when you are done.
You will be asked which agent definition to use. Your organization has two —
Default (Claude Code) and Default (Codex) — and connecting a credential in
step 1 flagged the matching one as your default, so the right
one is already selected.
It launches into the sandbox environment, the workspace default and the one you connected a
controller to.
The launch shows you a timeline as it goes — resolving the image, starting the container, setting it up. Scratchpad has no repository, so it skips most of that and is quick. A repository-backed project's first launch spends real time building an image; later ones reuse it.
If it stops partway, A launch that will not finish goes through the steps one by one — where it stopped is what tells you why.
3. Talk to the agent
When the sandbox is ready you get a session — the live conversation between you and the coding agent in that container. Type what you want done. The agent has a shell and a filesystem, so it can write code, run it, and tell you what happened.
The session persists server-side: close the tab and come back to it later. → Sandboxes and sessions
There is no repository behind Scratchpad, so nothing the agent writes there is pushed anywhere. It is the right place to try things and the wrong place to leave work you want to keep. When you are ready for real work, create a project from a repository.
What you just used
| You used | Which is | More |
|---|---|---|
| Your organization and the Default workspace | Your tenant, and a container for related work | Workspace |
| A coding-agent credential | Your model account, frozen into the container at launch | Credentials |
The sandbox environment and its controller | Where containers run, and the thing that runs them | Environment · Controllers |
| The Scratchpad project | What code the agent works on — here, none | Project |
| A sandbox and a session | The container, and your conversation with the agent in it | Runtimes · Sessions |
Where to go next
- Concepts at a glance — the whole model on one screen, now that the nouns mean something.
- Projects — point PlatformSmith at your own code.
- Agent definitions — make the agent yours: its prompt, its tools, its MCP configuration.
- Playbooks — your organization ships with three, ready to run.
- Forgemate — the assistant in the corner of every screen, and what it can do for you.
- Security and tenancy — before you invite anybody else.