Your Mandaire is being provisioned. This page walks you through getting it running so you can start talking to it about what you want to build. About fifteen minutes for the essentials. Most of the actual setup happens in conversation with the AI once you can reach it; this page just gets you to that conversation. If anything breaks or feels confusing, reply to your welcome email and we'll fix it on our side.
Four required steps. Each has one task, one thing to confirm worked, and a "trouble?" expandable if it doesn't. Don't skip ahead; each step builds on the one before.
Open the welcome email we sent you. It has:
On the dashboard, set your real password. Leave this tab open; you'll come back to it in step 3.
Most common issues:
You talk to your Mandaire through Element, an open-source chat app that connects to your private Mandaire room over an encrypted channel. Think of it as the door you walk through to talk to Mandaire. Element is free; nothing on Element's side ever sees your conversation contents.
You can use Element on both your computer and your phone at the same time. Conversations stay in sync.
Most common issues:
Mandaire does its thinking using your Claude account, not ours. We never sell tokens. You bring your Claude API key, and the AI reasoning runs against your subscription; every dollar you spend on tokens stays visible to you on the Anthropic side.
Most common issues:
Now the real setup happens, in conversation with the AI, not on a form. Open the Mandaire room in Element. Send a single message: "Ready to start".
The AI will then walk you through everything that's left, asking one question at a time. Expect it to cover (in some order, with detours if you have questions):
None of this is a fixed script. If you tell the AI "I don't have a domain yet, can you suggest some?" it will. If you say "skip GitHub for now, I want to think first," it will. The AI's job is to get you to a working first iteration; the path is yours.
Most common issues:
Mandaire is now connected and ready to build with you. The optional connections below add capability but are not required.
The AI will offer these in conversation when they become relevant. You don't have to set them up ahead of time. Here for reference.
If your project deploys to somewhere other than Cloudflare Pages (AWS, Vercel, Railway, Fly.io, your own server), Mandaire can handle that. The AI will ask for the relevant credentials when the project needs them. All credentials stored encrypted; revocable from the dashboard.
If you're building something that takes payments, Mandaire can integrate Stripe (or alternatives) into your build. The AI will guide you through the API-key flow when you ask it to add billing. Production keys are gated behind explicit approval; Mandaire never moves live money without your sign-off.
By default Mandaire reports back in Element. If you want the same brief mirrored to Slack, Discord, or as a text message (via Twilio), the AI can set that up. Useful if your team uses one of those for ops.
If you have an existing system Mandaire should know about: a database, an internal API, a third-party service it doesn't already know; you can hand Mandaire an MCP server URL and credentials. The AI will ask if there's anything like this during onboarding; you can also add them later. Read-only by default; writes require explicit approval per integration.
In Element, send "pause" to your Mandaire room. The AI immediately stops all building, deploying, and proactive work. In-progress conversations finish gracefully. Send "resume" to start again. The dashboard also has a Pause button at the top.
If you ever want to immediately cut off Mandaire's ability to think: rotate the key on Anthropic's side at console.anthropic.com/settings/keys. Mandaire stops working within seconds. Replace it in the dashboard when you're ready to resume.
Reply to your welcome email with the word offboard. Within 24 hours we'll: (1) push your full code repository to a destination you control, (2) export your decision history, audit log, and taste-memory corpus as plain markdown to that same destination, (3) revoke every credential Mandaire holds on your behalf, (4) shut down and delete your Mandaire server, (5) send you a confirmation log showing every revocation. Your code, your domain, your data, all yours. No retention, no friction.
The whole stack is open-source. If you'd rather run it on your own infrastructure than have us host it, the self-host path is described at how it runs. You can switch any time; we'll help with the migration.