The desktop app

The desktop app is the visual front door to Spikefrost: a workspace where your teams, apps, and conversations live, and where an AI agent builds for you. It runs on macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel); Windows builds are on the roadmap. Get it from the download page.

It bundles the sf command-line tool, so installing the desktop app also gives you the developer interface — see The sf CLI.

Signing in

Enter your work email, get a 6-digit code, and you're in. No passwords. If you have access to more than one environment of the platform, the Advanced section on the sign-in screen lets you pick it — leave it on Production unless you were told otherwise.

Separately, chat-driven building needs a coding agent installed on your Mac: either Claude Code or Codex, signed in with your own account. Getting started covers both.

The layout

The rail (far left) is your app switcher. It lists every app you can reach, filterable, sortable by Recent or A–Z, and collapsible with ⌘. — drag its edge to resize. Two fixed entries sit at the top: Home, and Connect Mobile for pairing a phone.

Home is where you manage things rather than build them. A Teams list on the left, and four tabs for the selected team:

Tab	What's there
Apps	Every app in the team, as a grid or list. Create, open, duplicate, delete
Connectors	The team's connectors and their status
Usage	What the team has spent on AI usage
Settings	Team-level configuration

A badge next to the team name shows which platform environment you're signed in to.

An app view opens when you pick an app from the rail. This is the workspace: a chat on one side, your app's files and output on the other.

Creating an app

New App asks for two things: a name and a template (or Blank app). The app is created in the cloud immediately. To build locally, add it to your Mac — that pulls a working copy into your Spikefrost apps folder, and that folder is what you and the agent edit.

Duplicate App deep-copies an existing app, optionally into a different team — useful for spinning a variant off a working app. Note that a duplicate is a separate app from then on. If what you want is a staging version of the same app, you want an environment, not a duplicate.

Building by chatting

Type what you want. The agent reads the project, plans, writes code, runs commands, and shows its work as it goes.

Things worth knowing:

• You can steer mid-run. Type while it's working and it adjusts course. Stop halts the current turn.
• Attach files or images — drop them into the composer. Screenshots are an efficient way to describe a UI change.
• Enter sends; Shift+Enter makes a new line.
• The model and effort selectors control which model answers and how hard it thinks. Higher effort is slower and better at gnarly problems.
• Each chat is tied to an agent — the one chosen when the chat was created.
• The environment selector scopes the session, so the data and logs you see belong to the environment you picked rather than always production.

Conversations persist. You can come back to a chat and it remembers the app and what you were doing.

The app toolbar

Per-app buttons, roughly in the order you'll reach for them:

Button	What it does
Open Site	Opens the deployed app in your browser
Editor	Opens the project in your code editor
Terminal	Opens a shell in the app's folder (iTerm if you have it)
Finder	Reveals the app's folder
Data	Browses the app's database
Logs	Request logs for the app
History	The app's version history — every commit, including the agent's
Phone	Pairs your phone to test the app's mobile companion

There's also a command palette (⌘K) for jumping between apps and actions.

Environments in the UI

The environment selector in an app view scopes what you're looking at — Agents, Schedule, and Data all follow it. If you're debugging a staging problem, switch the selector rather than second-guessing whether the rows you're seeing are production data.

Connecting a phone

Two separate features share the phone metaphor:

• Connect Mobile (in the rail) pairs your phone to your workspace, so you can talk to your apps from anywhere. Turn it on, scan the QR code, and the paired devices are listed so you can revoke them later.
• Phone (in an app's toolbar) tests that app's native mobile companion on your device. Full flow: Test on your phone.

The account menu

Bottom of the window. Your theme, the Mac's Claude Code account (Change swaps it), the app and CLI versions currently installed, a shortcut to the apps folder, and sign-out.

Updates install themselves. When a new version is ready a bar appears with a Restart action; Check for updates forces a check. Keep the app in /Applications — automatic updates need a permanent, writable home.

When to leave the desktop app

• Scripting or automation — the CLI.
• Billing, team members, invitations — the web console at c.spikefrost.com.
• Working entirely in your own tools — open the folder and run Claude Code or Codex yourself. Same app, same files, same history.