roboco/docs/how-to/02-it-starts-with-you.md

# It starts with you

## 1 · It starts with you

You describe what you want — a feature, a fix, an entire product. The way in is the **Task Assistant** — which is the **Prompter** itself, the very feature whose build the rest of this guide follows. (You're about to use the tool RoboCo built for itself; further on, you'll watch the company build it.) Instead of filling a form from memory, you give it a rough idea and it reads your *actual* codebase, asks a few sharp questions, and hands back a properly-formed task — an objective, a per-cell breakdown, and the acceptance criteria that define what "finished" really means.

![The Task Assistant's scope form: pick the project or product to work in, then describe what you want to build.](../images/start_prompter.png)

*Where it starts — point the assistant at a project (one repo) or a product (several), drop in a rough idea, and it spins up an agent that reads that code before it says a word.*

There is a third scope, **MegaTask**, for when you want several tasks at once across projects that don't share a codebase — the assistant proposes the whole batch and the company sequences it into conflict-free waves. See [MegaTask](../company/megatask.md).

![The Task Assistant chat opening: the idea is in, and the agent is cloning the repo and reading the code before it answers.](../images/prompter_run_1.png)

*No canned questions. The agent clones the scope and reads the real surface first, so everything it asks and proposes is grounded in what your code actually does.*

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![The agent's grounded analysis: a read of the existing surface, what's missing, where the feature should live, and a proposed shape — citing real files and pages.](../images/prompter_run_2.png)

*It comes back having done the homework — naming the real pages, services, and files, laying out what to build and where, and refining with you over a couple of turns until the spec is right.*

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![The draft proposal card: the finished task — objective, per-cell work, and acceptance criteria — with three choices: Keep chatting, Board review & Start, or Approve & Start.](../images/prompter_draft_card.png)

*The proposal, ready to launch. Keep chatting to refine it, send it to the **Board** for review, or approve it straight to the Main PM — your call, on one card.*

![The Task Assistant's confirmation: the task has been created and handed to the company.](../images/prompter_task_accepted.png)

![The created task, live: its objective, the per-cell breakdown, status, and assignment — exactly as the company will work it.](../images/prompter_task_created.png)

*From a rough sentence to a real, scoped task in a single chat — acceptance criteria and all, already moving through the company.*

From here, every task follows the path you chose for it. To show that journey end to end, the rest of this guide follows the **Prompter's own** trip through the company — from this same starting point to a merged pull request. Send a task to the **Board** and their job is to pin it down: the Product Owner and Head of Marketing turn the draft into a settled spec, sharpening the requirements and the acceptance criteria before anyone writes a line of code. The Auditor watches the whole time but never interferes.

![A Board review session: the Product Owner writing out requirements and acceptance criteria for a task.](../images/chat_session.png)

*The Product Owner working a task over — pinning down the requirements and the must-haves before anyone writes a line of code.*

![A Board review session for the Prompter feature, with the Product Owner and Head of Marketing each recording their take — positioning, naming, the model-selector UX — against the task.](../images/po_hom_review.png)

*Two seats at the table. The Product Owner and the Head of Marketing review the same task from their own angles and put their reasoning on the record — this is the Board building the actual spec for the Prompter, the feature this whole walkthrough follows.*

## 2 · Nothing moves without your green light

The Board hands the reviewed task back to you as a **notification** and waits. You make one call: send it forward, or send it back. Approve it, and the **Main PM** picks it up, splits it across the cells, and sets them running.

![The board-review notification waiting on the CEO's decision to start the work or send it back.](../images/notifications.png)

*The Board's verdict lands in your notifications and pauses there. A single approval is what turns the whole company on.*

![The board-review-complete notification for the Prompter task: the Product Owner and Head of Marketing have both reviewed it, and it is now ready for the CEO's Approve & Start decision or rejection.](../images/ceo_review_notif.png)

*The notification itself, spelled out: the Board has finished, the task is recorded, and nothing happens until you say so — Approve & Start hands it to the Main PM; reject it and it goes back. This is the first of the only two moments the company needs you.*

![The CEO's pending-approval queue with a task card showing the green "Approve & Start" button.](../images/approve_task.png)

![The task detail panel opened from the approval queue, with the Approve & Start action alongside the task brief.](../images/approve_task_detail.png)

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