Getting started
Welcome to Walden
Walden is an idea book. It’s where you write down what you might build next, think it through until it’s clear, and hand it to the people, or the coding agents, who build it.
What Walden is for
Building software has gotten fast. The slow part is knowing what to build, and saying it clearly enough that it gets built right. Walden is for that part. You write the idea in your own words, and Walden helps you find the gaps before anyone starts building.
It’s made for founders, product managers and designers: anyone who decides what gets built and works with an engineering team or with coding agents.
How an idea moves through Walden
- Write it down. Describe the idea on Home in a few sentences. Chat drafts a first version for you to keep or discard, or you can start from a blank page. See Your first idea.
- Think it through. Every idea has the same parts: the Problem, what it’s Worth, the Approach, the Unknowns, and what you’re Not doing. Add a flow, a board or a sketch where it helps. See The idea page.
- Get questions. A Second reader reads the idea the way a builder, a decider or a skeptic would, and asks what they’d ask. Your team can leave questions in the margin too. See The second reader.
- See how far it’s got. Walden reads each part and tells you whether the idea is Sketched, Shaped or Ready. It never stops you. See Readiness.
- Hand it off. Choose Build it and download the idea as a package for your engineering team. See Handing off.
Or keep the idea open to a coding agent such as Claude Code or Cursor. The agent reads the idea from Walden, keeps its list of tasks here, and asks you when something isn’t decided. Someone on your team reviews what it built. See Coding agents.
What Walden doesn’t do
- Write the idea for you. Chat and the readers draft and ask. Nothing they write counts until you keep it. The words on the page are yours.
- Build anything. Once an idea is handed off, Walden keeps it open to whoever builds it. It doesn’t run, assign or schedule the work.
- Track time. There are no due dates, estimates or roadmaps. How far an idea has got is read from what it says, not from a calendar.
A few words to know
- Idea
- One thing you might build, with its pages. The first page is the idea itself.
- Idea book
- Your own workspace. Only you can see it.
- Workspace
- Where ideas live: your idea book, or a team’s shared one. See Workspaces and roles.
- Project
- The ideas for one product, with its code and shared files. See Projects.
- Draft
- Something chat wrote that isn’t yours until you keep it. See Drafts.
The rest are in the Glossary.
Where to start
Go to walden.so and choose Start with one idea. The Free plan needs no card. Then follow Your first idea.