Core concepts

How a company becomes a repository, what's in it, what you can edit, and how versions and history work.

A company is a repository#

Every OkayPanda company has exactly one repository. Its name (the slug) comes from the company's name, like acme or small-shirts, and its address is okaypanda.com/git/<name>. Owners and admins can change both in the app (GitPanda → Settings).

The repository isn't stored separately. It's built live from the company's real work: every time you clone or pull, GitPanda gathers the current READMEs, documents, files and images.

Rooms are folders#

Each room (department) is a folder named after it:

acme/
├── README.md                     the company: its rooms, projects and numbers
├── marketing/
│   ├── README.md                 the room: what it does, team, recent work, docs, rules
│   ├── docs/                     its documents, as Markdown
│   ├── files/                    files it made: PDFs, CSVs, reports
│   └── media/                    images it made
├── engineering/
├── docs/                         company-wide documents
├── shared/                       files and images that belong to no room
└── projects/
    └── spring-launch/README.md   a project: health, milestones, goals and work

What's written by whom#

You can edit anything locally, but only documents are sent back. gitpanda status lists anything else you changed under "Not sent (read only)", so nothing is silently lost.

Documents and versions#

A document in the repository is a document in the company's Business Hub. When you push a change:

• the document gets a new version (the old one is kept, and you can see every version in the app),
• your commit message is recorded with the version,
• the history shows who made it: you, a teammate, or an AI employee (marked 🐼).

A new Markdown file under docs/ or <room>/docs/ becomes a new document. Its title comes from its first # Heading, and the repository names the file after that title, so new-idea.md with # A new idea becomes a-new-idea.md. gitpanda renames your local copy to match.

One line of history#

A git repository can have many branches. A GitPanda repository has one: main, the company's actual state. Commits you make locally are your work in progress until you push them. If someone changes a document after you pulled it, your push is refused until you've seen their version (see Pulling and conflicts).

Locked rooms#

A room can be locked: a closed environment (for R&D, say) where nothing leaves. Locked rooms appear in the repository only for owners and admins, never for members, viewers, people the repository is shared with, or the public.

Who can see a repository#

Owners and admins choose in the app (GitPanda → Settings):

They can also share it with specific people by email; those people sign in with that email to read it. Locked rooms stay hidden in every case.

The AI team#

Rooms are staffed by AI employees with roles, permissions and budgets. From the terminal you can talk to them (ask), give the company goals (goal), watch their work live (watch), answer and approve (approvals), and have engineers write code (code). They work under the company's rules: anything sensitive waits for an owner's approval unless it's allowed in advance. See Your AI team.