Join early access

Getting started

This guide takes you from a fresh workspace to your first completed loop. You will connect a repository, set a North Star, fire an intent, watch analysis produce evidence, promote a proposal into an epic, and see the loop close.

1. Create your workspace

Sign in at app.stellaloop.com and create an organization, then a project inside it. A project is the loop’s home: it holds your linked repositories, your North Star constellation, your analyzer registry, and your proposal pool.

Two things worth doing immediately:

  • Press ⌘K (or Ctrl K) to open the command palette. Every action in Stella Loop is reachable from it.
  • Press ⌘⇧S anywhere to capture a signal — a thought, a bug, a request. You will triage these later; capture is deliberately instant.

2. Connect a repository

In organization settings, open GitHub and install the Stella Loop GitHub App on the account that owns your repositories. Then, in project settings → Repositories, link one or more repositories to your project. For each repository you choose the version-control workflow: git (the default) or Jujutsu.

From the moment a repository is linked, newly arriving GitHub issues flow into your signals queue, and branches, pull requests, and checks mirror into the project in realtime. See GitHub integration for the details.

3. Set the North Star

Open Constellation and create your first North Star documents. Three ways in:

  • Start from a template — product, design, engineering, and agent-experience types ship with starting points.
  • Import from a repository — an existing VISION.md or principles document can be imported once or kept in sync from git.
  • Start blank.

Activate a document to make it part of the live aim (activation pins a citable version). Set per-document weights if some concerns matter more than others — per-document scores roll into the composite through these weights. See North Star.

4. Fire your first intent

Open Intents and create one. Pick the archetype that matches your situation:

  • Directed — you know the work: “Add CSV export”. Defaults to targeted analysis such as feature pre-scoping.
  • North Star-driven — you want the evidence to decide: “Move us toward the aim”. Defaults to a broad analyzer battery.

Submit it for approval, approve it, and it fires: the analyzers in scope fan out in parallel. Watch the run live on the intent’s Analysis tab — each analyzer produces a report (RPT-n) with findings and scores. The built-in suite covers UX walkthrough, code quality, security review, feature pre-scoping, gap analysis, demand signals, and North Star satisfaction. See Intents and Analysis.

5. Prioritize and promote

When analysis settles, proposals are derived from the reports and land in the Pool — grouped into sibling sets where several approaches answer one problem. Reorder by priority (drag, or entirely by keyboard), link dependencies, and prune what you won’t do (a reason is required — nothing disappears silently).

When a set is worth committing to, Promote it. Promotion is the commitment point: it creates the epic, and it is deliberately the only way an epic can be created. For sibling sets with genuinely divergent approaches, the promote dialog shows the engine’s guidance on whether a tournament — racing the approaches on real branches — is worth the spend. Out of the box, promotion requires a human’s approval.

6. Plan, implement, review

The epic (EPC-n) moves through an explicit pipeline: Plan → Implement → Review → Done.

  • Plan — each candidate is turned into a spec by the configured spec tool (OpenSpec by default) and decomposed into tasks. Approve the spec to hand off.
  • Implement — tasks (TSK-n) are claimed by humans and agents. An agent’s session is race-safe: claiming uses compare-and-swap with a lease, so two agents can never hold the same task. Point an agent at stella work list --ready and it can drive itself.
  • Review — a panel of reviewer agents (plus any humans you add) evaluates the work through explicit lenses. Verdicts are modeled edges: fix sends work back to implementation, re-spec reopens the plan, accept drives the ordered merge through the epic.merge gate.

When the merge lands, scores resolve on the dashboard, learnings are recorded, and seed intents are drafted from what was learned — the next loop is ready to start. If the epic began life as a signal, Stella Loop can post a resolution notice back to the original thread.

7. Dial in autonomy

Everything above ran with default gates: promotion and merge required your approval; most other transitions ran autonomously with an audit trail. As trust grows, open project settings → Gates & autonomy and move the dial — supervised, balanced, or autonomous — or configure individual gates. Standing intents with re-fire triggers (post-merge, on a schedule, on a score drop) make the loop turn continuously. See The loop engine.

Set up an agent

Every step above is equally available to an agent:

npm install -g @stella-loop/cli
printf %s "$STELLA_API_KEY" | stella auth login --with-key
stella project switch ATLAS
stella work list --ready
stella task claim TSK-214
stella context show TSK-214

Create the API key in settings → API keys. See Agents for the full walkthrough, and MCP if your agent speaks the Model Context Protocol.