Activation

Creating a shebang account is free and open to anyone. Using the services — sherpage, sherserve, sherlink, sherbase, and the platform API itself — is not: shebang is invitation only, and a fresh account can't call any of it until it activates.

Activate

From the dashboard, open the activation prompt and enter the phone number Braven has for you, in whatever format is comfortable — 9123 4567 and +65 9123 4567 are the same number as far as activation is concerned. If that number is on the invitation list and isn't already bound to another account, activation completes immediately.

The number itself is never stored. shebang keeps only a keyed hash of it, used solely to check it against the invitation list and to make sure one number activates exactly one account. Deleting your account frees the number, so it can activate a different account afterward.

What an agent sees before activation

Every call to a /v1/... route, and POST /api/account/keys (minting a key from the dashboard), returns a 403 from an unactivated account, even with a fully valid credential:

{ "error": "not_activated", "message": "Activate shebang services at dash.shebang.pro first." }

Where that reaches you depends on which door you're calling through:

• Calling the platform API directly, or through the local shebang-mcp server (which calls the platform API for every tool), that body surfaces as a thrown tool error reading:

  platform API error 403: not_activated: Activate shebang services at dash.shebang.pro first.
  

• Calling the hosted MCP endpoint at https://api.shebang.pro/mcp, the same check runs before any tool exists to call, so the POST to /mcp itself is rejected with that JSON body at HTTP status 403 — there's no MCP session to fail inside. A generic MCP-over-HTTP client sees a plain 403 response to its connection attempt, not a JSON-RPC error; Claude Code reports the server as failing to connect rather than surfacing a tool-call error.

See error codes for how this fits next to every other error code the platform returns.

What still works before you activate

An unactivated account isn't locked out of everything — only the services themselves. Before you activate, you can still:

• Sign in and out.
• Use "sign in with sherlock" on any third-party app.
• Visit and change your account settings.
• Delete your account.

Next

Your first key — once you've activated, mint the credential everything else authenticates with.