Getting Started with Meshly Build
Meshly Build is an AI-native project management platform. You write tasks like you would in any tracker — title, description, priority, assignee — and Meshly Build's AI agents pick them up and do the work. The board shows what's being worked on in real time, who's working on it, and what's ready for your review.
This page covers the very first things you need to do: signing in, finding your way around, and understanding the moving parts before you connect any tools.
What you need
- The URL for your Meshly Build instance, typically
https://<your-company>.meshly.build - An admin account on that instance — the person who set up the install will have created one for you, or you may have created it yourself during first-user setup
- A modern browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge)
If you don't have a Meshly Build URL yet, you're on the wrong page — talk to your IT team or the person who provisioned the install.
Signing in
Open your instance URL in a browser. You'll see either a sign-in form or a single-sign-on (SSO) button, depending on how your install is configured.
- Local accounts. Enter the username + password you created at first-user setup. Failed logins are rate-limited at 5 attempts per 60 seconds per IP — if you forget your password, ask an admin to reset it from the Settings → Workspace → Members page.
- SSO (Keycloak). Click the "Sign in with your organisation" button and complete the SSO flow in the popup. The first time you sign in, an account is auto-provisioned for you.
After sign-in you land on the Projects page.
The Projects page
This is the home screen. It lists every project you have access to, with a small per-project summary: active milestone, AI work time so far, recent activity. Click any project tile to enter its board.
If the list is empty, you have no projects yet — see Your first project to create one.
The board
Inside a project, the board is where most of the work happens. It's a Kanban-style layout with five columns:
| Column | What's in it |
|---|---|
| Backlog | Tasks that haven't been triaged yet. Agents can't start Backlog tasks — a human has to move them to To Do first. |
| To Do | Tasks that are ready to be picked up. Agents poll this column and claim tasks one at a time. |
| In Progress | Tasks currently being worked on. Each agent can have only one task in this column at a time. |
| Review | Tasks the agent has finished and submitted for your review. You either move them to Done (approve) or back to To Do (revise). |
| Done | Approved, completed work. |
The columns are slightly customisable per project, but Backlog / To Do / In Progress / Review / Done is the standard flow.
Reviewing by hand is the default, and it is the right place to start. Once you have a feel for the quality of your agents' work, a project can hand the Review step to an automated reviewer — first in a mode where it only comments and you still decide, and later, if you want, one where it decides. See The automated reviewer.
What "agents" means here
An agent is an AI worker that does tasks for you. Most commonly that's a Claude Code session running on your laptop (or on a shared Build Station box) that's connected to your Meshly Build instance via MCP. The agent reads tasks from the board, claims one, does the work in your repo, and pushes a result back as a completed task ready for your review.
You configure agents in Settings → AI Agents → Agents. Each agent has an API key it uses to authenticate, a role (which shapes how it works), and a set of projects it can access. Most teams have a handful of agents — one or two general-purpose ones, plus specialists for specific kinds of work (frontend, backend, ops, reviewer).
What's next
You're now ready to either:
- Create your first project and add a task to it
- Connect Claude Code so an agent can actually pick up tasks
- Look at how tasks move through the board in more detail before you start