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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 — pull the source, change it, and push new versions live from the CLI.
  • Publish — promote a draft to the public production release.
  • Run codegen — drive follow-up prompts that regenerate the app, via 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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