Skip to content
Greenlight by Shift AI

Build with your agent

For citizen developers

You don’t write code or commands. You describe what you want, and your coding agent builds it through Greenlight. This page covers the two things that happen first: making sure your agent is connected, and asking for the right thing.

Your agent is probably already connected

Section titled “Your agent is probably already connected”

Your coding agent reaches Greenlight through a plugin. In most organizations IT turns this on for everyone, so the plugin is already there — and already pointed at your Greenlight install — the moment you open your agent. Greenlight ships this plugin for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor; any other MCP-capable agent connects with the Greenlight MCP URL (see Other agents).

In an organization-managed Claude Code rollout, IT also configures Auto Mode so Greenlight MCP and CLI actions proceed without separate Claude approval interruptions, including installing or refreshing the CLI from your trusted Greenlight control plane when the plugin copy is unavailable. Greenlight still enforces your identity, role, policy checks, and audit trail on every governed action.

To check, ask your agent to do something with Greenlight — “list my Greenlight apps,” say. If it can, you’re set. The first time it touches Greenlight it asks you to sign in through your organization’s identity provider; sign in once and you’re done.

If it isn’t there yet

Section titled “If it isn’t there yet”

The best first step is to ask IT to roll it out to your team — enabling it for everyone is their call and the smoothest path for everyone after you.

If you’d rather add it yourself in the meantime, open the dashboard’s Agent setup page (/settings/agent-setup), choose your agent, and choose one of your organization’s marketplace repositories. Pick a public source — the commands below clone the repository from GitHub, so a private source works only when IT has given your desktop Git access. (On Claude.ai and the Claude Desktop app, there’s nothing to add: Greenlight appears in the app’s plugin menu once IT has enabled it in the Claude admin console.) The Greenlight URL is already baked in, so you don’t paste it anywhere.

  1. Open the plugin marketplace and choose Add marketplace.
  2. Enter the repository selected on Agent setup.
  3. Install the Greenlight plugin, then sign in through your identity provider on first use.

Command-line equivalent:

Terminal window
/plugin marketplace add <selected-org>/<selected-repo>
/plugin install greenlight@greenlight-tools

Other agents

Section titled “Other agents”

For any agent Greenlight doesn’t ship a packaged plugin for, connect it to the Greenlight MCP server directly. The Agent setup page gives you three copyable values:

  1. Your MCP URL — https://greenlight.<your-org>/mcp — paste it into the agent’s MCP-server settings as a Streamable HTTP MCP server.
  2. The Greenlight skill file — a single instructions file you can drop into agents that read free-form rule/skill files.
  3. The CLI installer — the /cli/install.sh URL on the same Greenlight host, for agents that need the standalone CLI fallback.

Either way, the first tool call prompts the same identity-provider sign-in.

Describe what you want

Section titled “Describe what you want”

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.

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-tickets and 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.

Don’t have a fully-formed idea? That’s fine too. Ask the agent what you could build, and it starts by looking at what’s available in your organization — which data sources apps can use, what your colleagues have already built — then suggests ideas and asks a few quick questions (who will use it, whether it needs to remember data, which company systems it should pull from) to shape yours.

What the agent does next

Section titled “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.

  1. Registers the app. A new repository appears in your organization’s source control, and the app shows up in the Greenlight dashboard.
  2. Reads context. The agent pulls Knowledge from your organization — design system, conventions, integration playbooks — so the app matches how your org works.
  3. Shows you the app as it takes shape. The agent runs a live preview while it builds and puts it in front of you — you watch screens appear, click around, and react. “Make the table sortable,” “that blue is wrong,” “move the button” — changes here take seconds, so this is where most of the shaping happens. The agent doesn’t publish a change you haven’t seen working.
  4. Declares the integrations it needs. If the app needs Snowflake or Slack or anything else, the agent declares it in the app’s greenlight.yml. When the pull request merges, Greenlight activates the grant automatically if your org’s policy allows it, or queues it for IT to approve — you’ll see a “waiting on IT” status until they do. (That merge-time activation is the app’s access path; for local work with no app at all, your agent can request access for you instead — see Local development.)
  5. Opens a pull request. The agent writes the code and opens a pull request. Greenlight’s policy check runs automatically.
  6. Deploys on merge. Once the policy check passes and the pull request merges, the app deploys. The agent verifies it works, then shows you the live app.

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.

Your app knows who’s signed in

Section titled “Your app knows who’s signed in”

You’ll never set up logins. Everyone reaches your app through your organization’s single sign-on, the same way they reach everything else — so by the time someone opens your app, Greenlight already knows who they are and has confirmed they’re allowed in.

Your app gets that knowledge for free, which means your agent can build features that are personal to each user without any of the usual account plumbing:

  • Per-person settings and data — “save my filters,” “show my drafts,” “remember what I picked last time.”
  • Showing who’s here — “Signed in as priya@acme.com,” a personalized greeting, or attributing each action to whoever did it.
  • A tailored view — surfacing the right starting screen for the person looking at it.

Just ask in plain terms — “remember each person’s settings,” “show who submitted each request” — and the agent wires it up. Who is allowed to use the app at all is a separate, IT-controlled setting (see Getting help from IT); this is about making the app feel personal once they’re in.

When the agent asks you something

Section titled “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 — “this app needs Snowflake access, which IT will have to approve. OK to request it?”

Answer in plain language. The agent translates your answer into the right configuration.

Next

Section titled “Next”
Local development How the agent builds and runs your app against real, governed data — with no credential on the laptop.
Your app The statuses your app moves through, and the Knowledge that makes the agent smarter over time.
Getting help from IT When the agent needs IT to step in.