Is it possible to develop a Fluent app locally in VS Code without source control?

[JaineelPetiwale]

Hi Community 👋

I've been developing a Fluent-based scoped app on our company instance and honestly — developing in Fluent is a lot of fun. The language itself is clean and modern, and I can see why ServiceNow is pushing this as the future of pro-code development.

But I've hit a practical wall and wanted to check if anyone has found a workaround.

Our situation:

• We don't have NowAssist / AI assistance on our instance
• We don't have source control set up yet, and it's not on the roadmap anytime soon
• I have AI assistance in my VS Code locally (Copilot / Claude etc.) which is genuinely great for Fluent development

What I'm trying to do: I want to pull my existing Fluent app from the instance, develop locally in VS Code (with AI help), and push it back to the instance — all without source control.

In the traditional app world, I used to do this easily with:

• sn-scriptsync — live sync via WebSocket, worked great
• ServiceNow Extension for VS Code — pull/push scripts directly

But from what I understand, both of these don't work for Fluent-based apps, since Fluent compiles to metadata rather than being deployed as raw scripts.

My question: Is it at all possible to:

1. Pull a Fluent app from an instance locally (without source control / GitHub)
2. Do development in VS Code using Fluent + @Servicenow/sdk
3. Push/deploy it back to the instance

I've looked at @Servicenow/sdk and the ServiceNow IDE extension, but all the documented workflows seem to assume you have a Git repo set up. Is there any way to do this without source control, even if it's a workaround?

Would love to hear from anyone who has solved this or found a creative workaround. Thanks!