Set Sail: Deploy to Serverless

Set Sail is PaddleBoard’s serverless-first “deploy to $platform” button. Quick-deploy the current project to Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, or Vercel — no pipeline YAML, no IAM safari. The agent does the work, following the open-source s8sskills playbook.

Quick start

Click the ⛵ sailboat in the status bar (or run set sail: Deploy from the command palette).
Pick your platform. The modal pre-fills a service name from your project folder; adjust it, set a region where it applies (Vercel manages placement itself), and choose whether the URL should be public. Not set up on the vendor yet? The Get started link at the bottom of the modal takes you to their signup.
Click Set Sail. PaddleBoard:
- installs the platform’s s8sskills pack into your project’s .agents/skills/ — gcloud-project-setup + cloud-run-deploy (GCP), aws-project-setup + lambda-deploy (AWS), or vercel-project-setup + vercel-deploy (Vercel) — skipped if already present, so pin them in git for a fixed version;
- opens a PaddleBoard Agent thread that reads those skills and follows them.
The agent checks your CLI setup first. Anything interactive — gcloud auth login, aws configure, vercel login — is handed to you to run in a terminal; the agent never runs auth flows itself.
On success it reports your live URL and everything it created, so you can find (and later clean up) each resource.

Prerequisites

Platform	CLI	You need
Cloud Run	gcloud	An authenticated account and an active project with billing
AWS Lambda	aws	A working identity (`aws sts get-caller-identity`)
Vercel	vercel	An authenticated session (`vercel whoami`)

How it works

The platform knowledge is deliberately not hardcoded in PaddleBoard. Set Sail installs versioned skill packs from the community s8sskills catalog and lets the agent follow them — so support for more platforms (Azure, Cloudflare, Netlify, …) arrives by publishing skill packs, not by changing the editor. The deploy runs in a normal agent thread: every command goes through PaddleBoard’s usual permission flow, and you can watch, step through, or stop it like any other agent work.

Costs and cleanup

A real deploy creates billable resources in your cloud account (e.g. a Cloud Run service and Artifact Registry repo, or a Lambda function; Vercel hobby deploys are free-tier). The agent’s success report lists what was created — remove a test deploy with the platform’s delete command, e.g.:

gcloud run services delete <service-name> --region <region>
aws lambda delete-function --function-name <service-name>
vercel remove <service-name>

Rig the pipeline

The second mode. Instead of a one-off deploy, Set Sail sets up the durable flow — repo, GitHub Actions workflow, workload identity — so every git push deploys, the way production teams work. Pick it in the Set Sail modal alongside Quick deploy.

Pipeline support arrives per platform, as each one’s s8sskills pack is authored. It’s ready for Cloud Run, AWS Lambda, and Vercel; on Azure, Cloudflare, and Netlify the modal shows a “coming soon” note and Quick deploy still works. A custom platform bypasses the check entirely, since you supply the steps.

What’s next

More platforms as s8sskills packs land — both for Quick deploy and for pipelines.

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