Quick start

Get started with Nova in 5 minutes.

Nova is two products in one surface: Vibe for chat-to-app prototyping with no setup, and Advanced for git-native edits that ship real pull requests. This guide walks both, plus budgets, team, and the API.

Open Nova Platform overview
01

Vibe mode — chat your way to a working app

No GitHub. No setup. Just describe what you want and Nova streams a working preview.

Open /novaand type a sentence. Nova generates HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a single response and renders it live in the preview pane. Each turn is a real iteration: you can ask for changes (“make the hero darker”, “add a pricing table”) and Nova edits in place.

Build me a landing page for a coffee subscription called "Beanbox".
Hero with email signup, three plans (Light, Dark, Decaf), testimonials,
and a footer with social links. Modern, warm, very on brand.

What you get out of the box:

  • Persistent threads, searchable and auto-titled.
  • Live preview with mobile / tablet / desktop frames.
  • 1-click publish to GitHub + Vercel when you’re ready.
  • Auto-saved snapshot of every generation. Revert anytime.
  • Brand kit + project memory so Nova knows your voice and stack.
02

Advanced mode — real edits on a real repo

Connect GitHub and Nova becomes a junior dev that ships pull requests instead of suggestions.

From the sidebar, click Connect GitHub. Pick a repo and a branch. Now you can ask Nova to read files, propose a unified diff, and either apply-patch or commit directly.

  • Apply patch — opens a 3-way diff. You accept hunk-by-hunk before anything writes.
  • Apply commit — direct commit (never to main, master,prod, release, or production — those force a PR).
  • Verification — clicking Verify dispatches your repo's nova-verify.yml GitHub Actions workflow and tracks the run live (queued → running → success/failure) with a link to the run page. Drop in our starter workflow to enable it.
  • Snapshots — every patch and commit takes a pre-change snapshot first. One-click revert from the thread.
  • Terminal — run shell commands in a sandboxed container; output streams back into the thread.
03

Team workflow — review, audit, RBAC

Invite teammates, assign roles, and watch every privileged action land in the audit log.

From /admin/nova/teams you can invite members and assign roles: owner, admin, member, viewer. RBAC gates every admin surface server-side, so a viewer literally cannot mutate a thread even by hitting the API directly.

Every action — login, MCP server change, key rotation, deploy gate decision — is written to the immutable audit log at /admin/nova/audit and can be exported as CSV or JSON.

04

Budgets and rate limits — transparent by design

Nova tells you what you’ve spent and stops you before a runaway script costs you $400.

Three layers protect you from surprise bills:

  1. Per-request cap — every chat request must fit under a single-call cost budget (default $0.02 of model spend).
  2. Per-user daily token budget — controlled by NOVA_DAILY_TOKEN_BUDGET and NOVA_DAILY_COST_BUDGET. When you hit the cap, chat returns 429 with a friendly upgrade CTA. Admins are exempt.
  3. Sliding-window rate limits — 30 HTTP-MCP calls/min, 12 tool-chat/min, 6 apply-patch/min, 3 apply-commit/min, 6 verify/min, per user. Backed by an in-process store today; durable Supabase-backed limits ship when we cluster.

Your live spend is shown in the header of every thread. Daily totals roll up under /admin/nova/monitoring.

05

API — automate Nova from your own stack

Every chat thread, snapshot and commit Nova can do, you can do from a curl one-liner.

API access is granted by application — see /nova/docs/api. Once you’re approved you’ll get a scoped API key (short-lived, IP-bound, per-project) and a small set of endpoints:

# Send a chat turn
curl https://nova.vxera.ai/api/nova/chat \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVA_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"threadId":"<uuid>","content":"Refactor the auth module"}'

# List snapshots for a thread
curl "https://nova.vxera.ai/api/nova/vibe/snapshots?threadId=<uuid>" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVA_KEY"

# Revert to the most recent pre-change snapshot
curl "https://nova.vxera.ai/api/nova/vibe/snapshots/latest-pre-change?repoName=<r>&branch=<b>" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $NOVA_KEY"

Webhooks for deploy gate, verification, anomaly, and audit events are configured under /admin/nova/webhooks.

06

FAQ

Does Nova auto-commit to main?

No, never. Branches named main, master, prod, production and release are hard-blocked from direct commits. Nova forces you through a PR with verification.

Where does my code run?

Vibe-generated artifacts are previewed in a sandboxed iframe. Advanced terminal commands run in an ephemeral container per request. Your GitHub credentials are stored encrypted with per-tenant RLS in Postgres.

Which model does Nova use?

DeepSeek V3 for chat and code generation. We use a single model on purpose: it makes cost forecasting honest and reproduces deterministically across users.

Can I roll back a bad change?

Yes. Every apply-patch and apply-commit takes a snapshot first. From the thread, hit the revert icon on any assistant turn. Vibe artifacts auto-snapshot every generation too — the snapshot history is in the right rail.

How do I get an API key?

Fill out the form at /nova/docs with your use case. Approved customers get a key within 1 business day.

Ready to ship?

Open Nova and build something real — or apply for API access to wire it into your own stack.

Open Nova Apply for API access