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🤖 Explain with AI

Getting Started with 4Geeks AI Studio: From Console to First Deploy

Overview

4Geeks AI Studio delivers software through pods: a human 4Geeks pod lead plus a small team of AI agents working on your repository. You describe the outcome, approve a plan and review a merge request. The pod handles the planning, the code, the tests and the evidence.

In this tutorial, you will:

  • Pick the plan that matches your workload (Lite, Starter or Pro)
  • Create your first pod from the wizard
  • Answer the intake and connect your repository
  • Approve the plan and follow the build
  • Review and merge what the pod delivers

Prerequisites

  • A 4Geeks account (sign up at console.4geeks.io)
  • A GitLab or GitHub repository with an access token that has write access to the project
  • An active AI Studio plan, or a card on file to start one

Step 1: Choose your plan

Open AI Studio in the console. The Plan and balance card shows your current plan, the tasks and pod lead hours used, the prepaid balance and the concurrency limit.

Plan Monthly base Tasks / month Pod lead / month Pods at once
Lite $390 10 On demand ($75/h) 1
Starter $790 15 2 h 1
Pro $1,590 40 6 h 3
  • Only delivered work is billable: a failed attempt and one retry are absorbed by 4Geeks.
  • Work above the monthly bag is paid from the prepaid wallet, never as a surprise invoice.
  • The organization owner or an admin can buy or change a plan from AI Studio; changes are prorated.

Tokens are measured for cost and support, but they are not a customer quota and never block a task.

Step 2: Open the wizard

In AI Studio, click New pod. The wizard has four steps: what you need, a few questions, the repository and the confirmation.

Choose the closest outcome: first slice of my product, add a feature, find and fix a bug, audit my code, migrate my database, document my system, improve quality and tests, update my dependencies, or a product or a platform.

If none fits, choose Something else and describe the goal yourself. If you prefer a person, choose I am not sure, I want help and a pod lead reads your answers.

Step 3: Answer the intake

The intake is five questions in business language. Only the marked ones are required.

Question Why it matters
What should it do? The outcome the plan will target. Describe the result, not the screens.
Who is going to use it? The audience and the roles the plan must cover.
What must it be able to do? The three or four things that cannot be missing.
Which systems does it need to talk to? Optional. Integrations such as payments, email or an ERP.
How will you know it is done? The acceptance test in your words. This becomes the definition of done.

Your answers become the brief the pod lead reviews and the planner uses to build the plan.

Step 4: Connect the repository

  1. Choose GitLab or GitHub and enter the instance URL (for example https://gitlab.com).
  2. Enter the project path and the branch the pod should start from.
  3. Paste an access token with write access to that project. It is stored encrypted in the vault and used only by the pod’s sandbox.
  4. Pick the runtime image: Base, Web, JVM or Android. The wizard suggests one when it can inspect the repository.

A pod works on a branch and opens a merge request. It never pushes to your protected branch.

Step 5: Confirm and create the pod

The confirmation screen shows the size (S, M, L or XL), the brief, the playbook, the repository, the runtime image, the capabilities, the tools, the available balance and the first estimate.

  • Capabilities turn on what the pod can execute: docs, SCRUM, data, quality, E2E, security, design and preview. You can change them until the plan is approved.
  • Tools are Jira, Confluence, Notion or a read-only database; you can connect credentials later.
  • Estimate and balance: top up the wallet first if the balance is low.

Click Create pod. The pod appears in the list and the plan is generated next.

Step 6: Approve the plan

When the plan is ready, the pod appears under Needs you. Review the summary, the tasks and their acceptance criteria, the assumptions, the risks and what is not included.

Click Approve and start to move the pod to building, or Request changes to send it back with feedback. Approving the plan is what starts the build.

Step 7: Follow the build

The pod room is organised top-down:

Zone What it answers
Header Entity, status and one progress line: phase plus completed tasks.
We need you The single most important pending decision: plan, budget, tool permission or a question.
What is happening The live timeline and the composer, with an Everything/Conversation filter.
Tasks Failures first, then the task in flight and the next ones.
Pod details The decided plan, team, wallet, deliverables and technical details.

While the pod works, the quality gate runs your repository’s own build and test scripts in the sandbox. A pod with Quality or E2E cannot be marked delivered without a green run, so the merge request that arrives has already passed QA.

Step 8: Review and merge

When the work is done, the pod opens a merge request with tests and evidence:

  1. Open the merge request in your repository.
  2. Review the diff, the tests and the evidence attached to the pod.
  3. Check the pod timeline if you want the full record; it exports as JSON with credentials redacted.
  4. Merge when you are satisfied. Your pipeline deploys.

The pod does not merge on its own and does not deploy to production.

Best Practices

  • Describe the outcome, not the steps. “Customers can pay with a saved card” beats “add a table and an endpoint”.
  • Write the definition of done in the intake. The clearer “done” is, the fewer rounds the plan needs.
  • Answer “We need you” quickly. The pod pauses at a decision, not in the background.
  • Keep the quality gate on. Build and tests are the cheapest insurance against a bad merge.
  • Top up before the wallet runs dry. A budget pause costs more time than a top-up.
  • Use the pod lead. They are included for scope, risk and blocked work.

What’s Next?

Need Help?

Still have questions? Ask on Discord or explore the tutorials.