Quick Start
Open the workspace
Section titled “Open the workspace”Go to chinilla.com/workspace in your browser.
Pick a starting point
Section titled “Pick a starting point”The launcher gives you three ways to start:
- Guided Wizard — answer a few questions (what you’re building, the main flow, scale, what could go wrong) and the AI hands you a first draft.
- Template — start from a ready-made system. Three groups:
- Lessons (free) — small designs that each teach one idea (Pipeline Basics, Branching & Merging, Resilience Patterns, Batch & Scale, Full Loop, Circuit Breaker Test).
- Examples (free) — real-world workflows (AI Evaluation Pipeline, Pottery Business).
- Interview (Pro) — classic system design interview problems (URL Shortener, Chat App, Notifications, Rate Limiter, File Upload, Pub/Sub, CDN, News Feed).
- Blank Canvas — drop blocks yourself.
New here? Start with a Lesson. Every block in a lesson has a description that explains what it does and what to watch for once you hit play.
Your first design by hand
Section titled “Your first design by hand”- Press
Aor click Add to switch to the Add tool. - Click on the canvas (or drag the + button) to drop a block. The setup window opens. Set the first one up as a Client, drop another, set it up as an API.
- Press
Cor click Connect, then click the Client and then the API to draw a line between them. - Double-click a block any time to rename it, change its description, or tweak numbers.
Hit play
Section titled “Hit play”Click Play in the timeline bar at the bottom. Items start flowing along your lines. Lines that get clogged turn yellow or red — that’s a bottleneck. The top bar shows live numbers (health, delivery rate, item counts) while it runs. Open the Overview panel from the left toolbar for a deeper read, plus Stability (Pro) and Monte Carlo (Pro).
Stress test
Section titled “Stress test”Open the Stress Test panel inside Overview to push your design harder:
- One-click scenarios — Baseline, Peak Traffic, Outage, Slowdown, Flash Spike, Cascade.
- Traffic dials — set how many items to send (1-1000) in the timeline bar and a traffic multiplier (1-10x) in the stress panel.
- Break things on purpose — kill a block or slow a line to see what happens.
Iterate
Section titled “Iterate”Open AI chat (the Chinilla AI button in the top-right) and ask for improvements, or fix things by hand. Run again to see if you actually fixed it.