Start using Shift

From a blank computer to working: about fifteen minutes, once. After that, using Shift is one word and talking.

1Accept the GitLab invitation

You have an email from GitLab inviting you to nextory/shared/shift. Click accept.

2Get the terminal ready

Windows

Press the Windows key, type terminal, right-click Terminal in the list, choose Run as administrator. Then run:

wsl --install

Restart your computer when it asks. The first time after the restart, a window asks you to pick a username and password — pick anything, it’s only for this computer.

When you type the password, the screen shows nothing — no dots, no stars. You ARE typing. Type it, press enter, type it again, press enter.

From now on, this is how you always open the terminal: press the Windows key, type terminal, press enter. Then type wsl, press enter.

Mac

Press ⌘ space, type terminal, press enter. That’s the terminal.

3Install Shift

Paste this in the terminal and press enter:

curl -fsSL https://mcp.shift.nextory.app/install.sh | sh

It installs everything — Claude included. When it says Done, type:

nxshift

Your browser opens twice the first time — once for Claude, once for GitLab. Approve both. Then Shift asks numbered questions:

Working in pm. What do you want to do?
  1. start something new
  2. continue something
> 2

Continue what in pm?
  1. summer-campaign   (last active 2026-08-27)
  2. price-tester      (last active 2026-08-25)
> 1

The questions show what exists — you pick a number.

Done when: Claude greets you inside your project.

4Say what you want

Type what you want. For example:

Build a simple page that presents our summer campaign:
one headline, one sign-up button, our brand.

It already knows Nextory’s rules, fetches the brand skill by itself, and when it writes a coding mistake you’d never spot, the write is refused and it fixes itself.

When something should go live, say so:

Ship it.

It runs the checks and comes back with a real address — summer-campaign.shift.nextory.app — with its own database and a record of exactly what produced it. If the work touched something irreversible (money, a contract, a credential), it pauses and names the person whose approval it waits for. That is by design, not an error.

The one habit that matters: if something comes out wrong, don’t fix the output — say so, right there in the chat. Shift records it, and the fix lands in the shared knowledge: for everyone, permanently.

5The three commands worth knowing

Everything happens by talking — but three short commands answer the “where am I?” question exactly, so neither you nor the AI ever guesses which project is meant:

nxshift	The whole product. It asks, you pick numbers, a session opens inside exactly one project.
nxshift open price-tester	Skip the questions when you know the name.
nxshift list	Everything your department has built, newest first.

+Optional: make your terminal great

The terminal you just got is the plain one. Five minutes turns it into the modern kind — a prompt that shows where you are, colours everywhere, icons, fuzzy search through your history. You don’t install any of it yourself: paste this into your Shift session and let it do the work.

Upgrade this terminal for me. Install and configure: the starship prompt
with a clean preset, zoxide, fzf with history keybindings, eza with ls/ll/la
aliases, bat, and delta as git's pager. Enable truecolor. Put every change
in one clearly marked block at the end of my ~/.bashrc (or ~/.zshrc on Mac)
so it is easy to find and remove.

Then the font - icons need a Nerd Font, and I want you to do this part for
me, not explain it. On Windows/WSL: install CaskaydiaCove Nerd Font to the
Windows side (per-user, no admin), then edit Windows Terminal's
settings.json yourself - it is under /mnt/c/Users/<me>/AppData/Local/
Packages/Microsoft.WindowsTerminal_*/LocalState/ - and set it as the font
for all profiles, keeping a backup of the file first. On Mac: install the
font, and since Terminal's font can't be set from the command line, give
me the exact clicks in one line and wait while I do it.

Don't change my default shell. Verify each tool actually runs before
saying done. Then tell me to close and reopen the terminal, and list what
each tool does, one line each.

If something looks wrong

You see	It means
the gate refused ...	Not an error — protection. The message says what was wrong, why, and the shape that works. The AI usually fixes it by itself; if it loops, tell it: “read the refusal and fix what it says”.
held - waits for a person	The work touched something that can’t be undone. The named person approves with one click, then say ship it again.
server unreachable	Check your internet; otherwise tell Richard — that one is his.

Anything else: Richard (AI Master). If the answer wasn’t on this page, that’s a gap in this page — say so and it gets fixed for the next person.