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Let someone else edit your app's code: developer grants

Sharing on Vibes DIY normally hands out access to an app's data — a viewer can read it, an editor can write documents. A developer grant is different: it hands out access to the app's code. Grant one, and another account can edit your vibe's source, push new versions, publish, and run codegen against it — as if they were building it — while you keep the parts that make it yours.

What a developer can do

Once you grant developer access on a vibe, that account can:

  • Edit and push code — open the vibe at its own address and work on it in the browser the way its owner does: chat with it, edit files in the Code tab and save, change its look in the Style tab. Or pull the source, change it, and push new versions from the CLI. Either way the app stays the owner's.
  • Publish — promote a draft to the production release.
  • Run codegen — drive follow-up prompts that regenerate the app, from the chat on the app's page or with the CLI's edit command.
  • Read all of its data and secrets — editing code that talks to the database means seeing what the database holds, so a developer has full read access to the vibe's data and its per-vibe secrets.

Think of it as inviting a collaborator into the workshop, not handing them the keys to the building.

What only the owner can do

A developer grant is deliberately not a transfer of ownership. These stay exclusively with you, the owner, no matter how many developers you add:

  • Grant and revoke developers — add a developer, and revoke one the moment you change your mind. A developer can never grant or revoke anyone — not another developer, and not themselves — so this control always stays with you.
  • Unpublish or delete the vibe.
  • Transfer ownership.

Because grant and revoke never leave the owner, the capability is always revocable: the moment you revoke a developer, every new push, publish, and data read is denied; a live session they already had open ends the next time it reconnects.

Grant access from the sharing panel

Open the vibe's Share panel (or App Settings → Sharing) and find the Developers section:

  1. Type the handle of the account you want to add.
  2. Click Add developer.
  3. The account appears in the list as active. To remove it, click Revoke — the row flips to revoked, blocking any further access (an already-open live session ends when it reconnects). Re-adding the same handle later reactivates the grant.

Handles are matched in their canonical form (lowercase, slug), so @Alice and alice resolve to the same account.

Grant access from the CLI

The vibes-diy developer commands manage the same grants from the shell. They target a vibe the same way the other commands do — --vibe handle/app-slug, --app-slug (defaulting to the current directory name), and --handle for the owner (defaulting to your default handle):

sh# Grant developer access on the current vibe to @alice
vibes-diy developer add alice

# List the developers on a specific vibe
vibes-diy developer ls --vibe jchris/hat-smeller

# Revoke a developer
vibes-diy developer rm alice --vibe jchris/hat-smeller

developer ls lists every grant, active and revoked, newest first. Add --json for machine-readable output.

Only the owner can run these mutations — a developer who tries to add or revoke a grant gets an owner-only error back.

When to use one

  • A collaborator on a single app. You want help building one vibe without sharing your whole account or every other app you own.
  • A contractor or teammate who should ship code but never be able to unpublish, delete, or hand off the app.
  • An agent or automation that pushes on your behalf, scoped to exactly one vibe.

For sharing an app's data rather than its code — read access, comment access, invite-by-email, or making it public — see the Sharing & Access reference. For the conceptual map behind accounts, handles, roles, and grants, see The Access Model.

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