Ask your agent to build
For citizen developers
You don’t write code or commands. You describe what you want. Your coding agent handles the rest.
The best prompts have three things: what the app does, who uses it, and what data it touches. With those three, the agent has enough to register the app, ask Greenlight for the right integrations, and start building.
Examples of good first prompts
Build me a small tool for the finance team to track reimbursements. People should be able to submit a request, a manager approves or rejects, and finance exports approved ones to a CSV. SSO only, just for internal employees.
I need a dashboard for the data team that pulls weekly sales numbers from Snowflake and shows the top 20 accounts. Read-only, and only the people in the data-team group should see it.
Make a Slackbot that listens to messages in
#it-ticketsand creates a row in our HubSpot CRM for each one, tagging the assigned person.
The more specific you are about who and what data, the less back-and-forth the agent needs.
What the agent does next
A few things happen between your prompt and a running app. You’ll see most of them in the agent’s chat.
- Registers the app. A new repository appears in your organization’s source control, and the app shows up in the Greenlight dashboard.
- Reads context. The agent pulls Knowledge from your organization — design system, conventions, integration playbooks — so the app matches how your org works.
- Asks for integrations. If the app needs Snowflake or Slack or anything else, the agent asks IT for permission. You’ll usually see a “waiting on IT” status until they approve.
- Opens a pull request. The agent writes the code and opens a pull request. Greenlight’s policy check runs automatically.
- Deploys on merge. Once the policy check passes and the pull request merges, the app deploys. The agent gives you the URL.
You don’t need to step in for any of the technical pieces. If something fails, the agent reads the failure and tries again. If it needs your input — clarification, an approval, IT to grant something — it’ll ask.
When the agent asks you something
Most of the time, the agent figures things out on its own. The exceptions are usually one of:
- A design decision — “should this app be public to the whole company or restricted to the finance team?”
- A naming choice — “what should we call this app?”
- A scope question — “do you want to add email notifications too, or keep it Slack-only for now?”
- An access request — “IT needs to grant Snowflake access. Should I file the request now?”
Answer in plain language. The agent translates your answer into the right configuration.