Using the demo
Every new ACE account comes with a ready-made project called Trakk, a lightweight issue tracker in the spirit of Jira. It is a playground: a real, working application you can ship features into without connecting any of your own code.
Trakk arrives already mapped. Its repository is connected and its codebase is fully discovered, so you can skip Create a project, Connect a repository, and Map your codebase, and go straight to asking for a feature.
What Trakk is
Trakk is a small issue tracker with projects, tickets, and a Kanban board. Because ACE has already mapped it, the agents know where the code lives and how it fits together. That makes the demo the fastest way to see the whole Software Factory flow, from a plain-language request to a merged pull request running live.
Signing in to Trakk
Whenever you open Trakk, either the sandbox copy you run while reviewing your work or the live app after a merge, the login screen expects these shared demo credentials:
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
admin@trakk.local | |
| Password | admin123 |
These credentials exist for the shared Trakk demo. They are not tied to your ACE account, and they do not apply to any project of your own.
The example: an Archives tab
In this walkthrough you ask ACE for a new Archives tab, with two areas: an archive for projects and an archive for tickets. Archiving reuses Trakk's existing soft delete, while permanently deleting an item invokes the hard delete. From the tab you can restore an item or permanently delete it, sort newest first with the option to reverse the order, and filter by project, label, who archived the item, and priority.
Step 1: Create a card
Open Software Factory → Development to see the Kanban board. Create a new issue card, name it Archive tab, and paste your request:
Add an Archives tab below Projects. In this Archives tab I want two areas,
the projects archive and the tickets archive.
Both projects and tickets already have hard and soft delete. Soft delete is
the one that should be used for archiving; permanently deleting an item,
through its own UI or the Archives tab, should invoke the hard delete.
- Both should have the option to restore or permanently delete an item.
- Default display order should be newest to oldest, with the option to reverse it.
- Filter modes are: per project, per label, per user who archived the item,
and per priority tag.
Create the issue. The card lands in the Backlog.
Step 2: Start the flow
Drag the card from Backlog to In Progress. This kicks off the whole chain of events: ACE triages the request and dispatches a planning sub-agent.
Open the card to follow along. The Conversation tab narrates progress in plain language, and here it reports that planning has been dispatched.
For a closer look, open Technical details. This is the execution-level view, a terminal-style trace of what each agent and sub-agent is reasoning about, turn by turn. The planning sub-agent keeps iterating until it has a plan ready for you.
Step 3: Review and approve the plan
When planning finishes, the card moves to In review and a plan appears, with the ordered sub-cards ACE intends to build and any open questions for you. Read it, then approve, request changes, or reject.
Nothing is written to Trakk's files before you approve the plan.
Step 4: Follow the tasks
Once you approve, ACE dispatches the work as sub-tasks and the master card returns to Running. To watch the individual pieces, switch the board filter from Stories to Tasks: each sub-card appears in To Do in its planned order of execution, then moves to In Progress one at a time.
The master card is your source of truth. It stays updated with progress, tracks each sub-task from To Do to Done, and surfaces any question an agent has for you.
Leave the filter on Stories for a less cluttered board, and do most of your work from the master card.
Inside Technical details → Execution trace, the Orchestrator is the main agent. Under it you can watch each sub-agent run, such as the implementation sub-agent writing the code.
Step 5: Review with a local environment
When the work is done, the master card returns for a final approval gate. Before you decide, you can open a local environment to inspect the result yourself. It gives you the exact files ACE touched, so you can review them, change things by hand, and run a sandbox to test the app.
Open a local environment from the card, or from Software Factory → Local environment in the sidebar. When it is ready, open it in VS Code.
Running the app there brings up Trakk's login screen. Sign in with the demo credentials above (admin@trakk.local / admin123).
From the final gate you can approve, request changes, or reject. Approving opens a pull request to the GitHub repository.
Step 6: Analyze and merge the pull request
Open Software Factory → Pull requests to find the pull request for your card.
If automatic PR analysis is enabled for the repository, every pull request is analyzed the moment it opens, and it cannot be merged until that analysis passes. Without it, you would run Analyze this PR by hand for each one, so automatic analysis is a good default to leave on.
When the analysis comes back clean, nothing blocks the merge. Merge the pull request.
Step 7: See it live
With the pull request merged, your deployment workflow runs and the demo redeploys. Open the app's link and sign in with the demo credentials above (admin@trakk.local / admin123). Trakk now has an Archives tab, with Projects and Tickets views, a working filter bar, and controls to restore or permanently delete each item.
That is a complete feature, from a one-paragraph request to a live deployment, with your approval at every gate.
Next steps
- Ready to work on your own code? Follow Ship your first feature on a repository you connect yourself.
- Try Talk to ACE to run this same flow from the Chat tab, in plain language.
- Explore Core Concepts to understand the Software Factory, agents, and workflows in more depth.