Member sites, internal tools or any web app, built by your coding agent with sign-in, email, scheduled jobs and an admin already in place.
Install Effortless from effortless.run. Then build a site for local meetups: groups post events with a cover image and a number of places, people sign up to save a place, and everyone going gets a reminder email the day before.
Your agent builds it on the plan you already pay for. No credits, no hosted editor, nothing to export.
Sign-in, password reset, emails, a database, an admin, hosting. Hosted builders do it for you and keep it: the app lives in their editor, your members' data in their cloud, and the bill in their credits.
Effortless gives your coding agent all of it in one program, so the app you design is the app that runs, on your server. It is made for people who design the app and direct an agent to build it.
It installs Effortless and builds the first version, with sign-in already working.
After each one it runs its checks and tests, and fixes what they find before you look.
One more sentence deploys it. The files, the data and the bill are yours.
The sample is Commons, a site for local meetups. People sign up, save a place at an event, and hear from it by email. Each row is one sentence typed into a coding agent and what it produced.
Sign-up took one sentence. Sign-in, password reset and invitations came with the new project, with tests. Passwords need 8 characters, sign-in allows 10 tries per address every 15 minutes, and a reset link works once, for an hour.
The agent wrote a test that fills an event, cancels a place and checks who gets the email.
A scheduled job and an email template you preview in the browser while you design it. Run against tomorrow's board game night, it queued 34 emails, one for each person going. Each run is a row in the admin.
Ask once for your colors, type and parts. The agent puts colors and type in one tokens file, makes buttons, fields, notices, the nav and cards into components, and shows them together on a styleguide page in the app. New features are built from those parts, so they look like the rest of the app.
Each part is one file in app/components, and the styleguide is a page in
the app that shows them all. Change a token and every page follows: the second frame is the same
styleguide after changing --color-brand.
The agent built the page from parts the styleguide already had: the nav, a field and a button.
The project's AGENTS.md says to, and a test checks every page: a button or
field written by hand fails effortless test and names the page and the part
to use instead.
The agent opens each page at phone width and fixes the layout. To try it on your own phone, effortless serve --public serves it through a Cloudflare tunnel.
The second sample is Fieldnote's hiring board: a small product company tracks its candidates in a tool built the same way, with roles deciding who sees what.
Lena, the hiring manager, sees all 13 candidates. Max, an interviewer, sees his 3. Moving a card to Interview emails the candidate. Tests check both views, and that Max cannot move someone else's candidate.
Typed into the admin's Ask box. Every project has an admin at /_admin, built from its tables. A question in plain words becomes one read-only query, checked against the schema, and returns the rows with the query beside them. Open a row to edit it, replace a file, or sign in as that user.
Ask needs an AI API key: the Vercel AI Gateway, or any OpenAI-compatible provider. Also in the program: file and image uploads, a job queue, AI features in your own pages, and a scrubbed copy of production to work on locally. All of it in the reference.
Coding agents write React, Svelte and Tailwind by habit, and the habit slips into a framework
they have not seen before. When it does, effortless check stops it with the
line, the fix and the docs section to read. The agent fixes it before you open the page, so what you
review already works.
The agent wrote the line the way Svelte would, and fixed it on its next step. Every project carries an AGENTS.md with the mistakes agents make here, and the reference ships in the program, so it matches the version you run.
There is no Effortless account. The app is a folder on your computer and runs on your server, with the database, sign-in, email and admin inside it.
A folder of plain files your agent edits. Put it in git, open it in any editor, or hand it to a developer.
One service and one volume for the database and uploads. Your host bills you, and you can move to any host that runs a container.
They sign in to your app. Their accounts, RSVPs and emails live in your database, not in someone else's service.
Not needed: an Effortless account, credits or seats, a second backend, a database key in the browser, or an export to leave. Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Copilot all work with it, on macOS with Apple silicon or Linux x86_64.
Ask your agent in one sentence. A deploy is Effortless and one volume for the database and uploads. The example here is Railway, which we recommend; any host that runs a container works the same way.
A bigger machine and a higher WORKERS, with no code change.
On the volume. Railway Buckets are next; Cloudflare R2 works today.
Turso support is next. Until then, scale up.
APIs change between releases. The release notes name each change, and check names lines that use a removed API. The source opens at 1.0.
Your members sign in to an app you designed, running on your server. Paste the prompt into your coding agent, or run the commands yourself.
Your agent installs Effortless and builds the first version.
In plain sentences; it checks its own work after each one.
One more sentence deploys it to your server.
Install Effortless from effortless.run. Then build a site for local meetups: groups post events with a cover image and a number of places, people sign up to save a place, and everyone going gets a reminder email the day before.
Or in a terminal:
$ curl -fsSL https://effortless.run/install.sh | sh Downloading effortless-darwin-arm64... Installed: Effortless v0.3.0 $ effortless new commons && cd commons $ ln -s AGENTS.md CLAUDE.md # Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md $ echo [email protected] >> .env # your account opens /_admin $ effortless serve → http://localhost:3000
The project contains AGENTS.md, a short guide for coding agents. The link
points Claude Code at it; Codex, Cursor and Copilot read it as is. macOS on Apple silicon and
Linux x86_64.
Setting up each agent.
The query language, schema changes, browser components and the commands the agent runs, with their real output.
Effortless