Get started · operator checklist
Your first hour with Ship.
Eight steps. About one hour the first morning, fifteen minutes every morning after. This is the operator path — humans drain the Inbox, watch the cadence, and let the loop carry the rest.
01
Sign in and open a workspace
Auth runs through Auth0; every operator lives inside one or more workspaces. The picker is the first thing you see — pick the workspace that owns the project you're shipping. The reference deployment is named after the org; the dogfooding workspace is called Ship on Ship.
Closed beta — request access at hello@harborgang.com.
02
Read the workspace home
The home view is four columns: needs‑you, active, drafts, parked. Every card is either a ticket, a decision, or an autopsy. The footer of the home view shows the most recent merged PR with timestamp — this is the cadence line.
If the home is empty, the system is quietly doing nothing. That's a finding, not a feature.
03
Drain the Inbox
Inbox holds decisions the agents cannot make alone: stuck PRs (no activity 24h+), orphan tickets skipped at a stage, learning captures from yesterday's retro. Address, dismiss, or escalate each one. Inbox count → zero is the morning ritual.
Inbox is not a backlog. Two things share a column and stop meaning the same thing the moment one of them costs you Tuesday.
04
Walk the Process view
Process → SDLC shows the eight states in order: Backlog, Planning, Executing, Reviewing, Awaiting input, Blocked, Closed (plus a Default flow). Each stage lists the agent role that acts there (Implementation specialist, Validation bundle, Code review). Click a ticket to see its current stage and agent activity.
Eight states. Named owners. The pipeline IS the product.
05
Check the DORA‑4 dashboard
Analytics shows deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recovery — recomputed every render. The DORA‑4 tier (Elite / High / Medium / Low) sits next to each metric. Live system status and yesterday's daily retro live below the charts.
The current reference workspace runs Elite on deployment frequency and lead time, High on the other two.
06
Browse Knowledge
Knowledge is the curated fact base behind every agent decision. Buckets group facts by area (Security, Inbox, Shipctl, Authentication, Configuration). Each fact has a source, a claim count, and an age. Import sources from .md files, GitHub repos, or live web pages.
Knowledge is the predecessor surface to Lighthouse. The temporal graph is replacing this storage gradually.
07
Open the Audit log
Audit logs every workspace, member, integration, pipeline, repo, improvement, clarification, invite, and agent action. Filter by actor, target, or date range. Every state change is an entry — the system is its own provenance.
If a question can be answered by grep, it is answered here.
08
Wire the local workbench
shipctl is the optional CLI you run from your repo. Pull bundles, fetch knowledge into a local checkout, send feedback, or work offline against a memory adapter. The CLI never publishes — the harvester is the single sanctioned write path.
Install: pip install shipctl (or grab the binary from the repo Releases tab).
The toolbelt
Four surfaces. One operator.
Ship has a web console, a chat entry point, a local CLI, and an optional open‑source memory companion. You won't need all four on day one.
Console
The web UI at app.ship.elmundi.com. Workspace picker, home, Inbox, Process, Knowledge, Analytics, Audit.
Navigator
The chat entry point inside the console. Project-first intent capture, mem0-backed memory across threads, explicit Switch/Exit gestures when intent flips mid-conversation.
shipctl
Local CLI. Fetch knowledge, send feedback, manage bundles. Read-only from the server's perspective. Offline-friendly.
Lighthouse (OSS)
Temporal knowledge graph over MCP. Optional companion when you want agents to query facts across sessions with valid_from / valid_until semantics.
Stuck on a step?
The book is the long read. The docs are the lookup.
If the rationale is what you want, the book has forty chapters of it. If you want the exact procedure, the docs index groups every surface by purpose.