add

Usage

treeship add [AGENTS]... [OPTIONS]

What it does

Detects which AI agent frameworks are installed on this machine and instruments them so they emit attestable events through Treeship. For each supported surface, add either installs an MCP server entry pointing at @treeship/mcp, or drops a Treeship skill file into the agent's skills directory — depending on what the agent supports.

Surfaces detected:

• Claude Code — adds @treeship/mcp as an MCP server in ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/...
• Cursor — same MCP path, in Cursor's MCP config
• Cline — same MCP path
• Codex — adds an MCP entry in ~/.codex/config.toml
• Hermes — drops a Treeship skill file
• OpenClaw — drops a Treeship skill file
• NinjaTech (Ninja Dev local IDE) — manual register today; SuperNinja remote attach is deferred
• Generic MCP — any tool that speaks MCP can pick up the same server entry
• Shell-wrap (custom) — for agents Treeship doesn't auto-detect; uses treeship wrap as a generic backstop

Examples

# Detect and instrument every installed agent
treeship add

# Instrument specific agents
treeship add claude-code hermes

# Non-interactive — instrument all detected agents without prompting
treeship add --all

# Show what would be done without writing anything
treeship add --dry-run

# Read-only: list detected agents, print a stable JSON shape, don't touch any config.
treeship add --discover --format json

Sample output

✓ detected 3 agents on this machine
  - claude-code (high confidence)   ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/...
  - cursor      (high confidence)   ~/.cursor/extensions/...
  - hermes      (medium confidence) ~/.openclaw/skills/

instrument all 3? (y/N) y

✓ claude-code: added @treeship/mcp to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
✓ cursor:      added @treeship/mcp to ~/.cursor/mcp.json
✓ hermes:      wrote ~/.openclaw/skills/treeship.md

3 agents instrumented. Restart each agent to pick up the change.

--discover (read-only)

treeship add --discover
treeship add --discover --format json

Lists every detected agent with surface, connection_modes, coverage, and confidence — without modifying any config. Useful for AI agents that want to see what's on a machine before deciding what to do, and for CI environments that need to confirm an instrumentation already happened.

The JSON shape is stable for downstream tooling:

{
  "agents": [
    {
      "surface": "claude-code",
      "display_name": "Claude Code",
      "connection_modes": ["native-hook", "mcp"],
      "coverage": "high",
      "confidence": "high",
      "evidence": ["/Users/me/.claude"],
      "recommended_harness_id": "claude-code",
      "note": null
    }
  ]
}

evidence lists the paths the discovery probe matched on (config dirs, skill files). note carries per-surface caveats — e.g. NinjaTech SuperNinja sets note: "remote attach not yet implemented" to flag that auto-instrumentation isn't possible today. Additional richer fields (deterministic agent_id, host, workspace, already_instrumented) are part of the agent-native bootstrap roadmap and will land in a later v0.10.x release.

Options

Idempotency

Re-running treeship add against an agent that's already instrumented is a no-op for that agent — the existing MCP entry or skill file isn't rewritten. Adding new agents to the machine and re-running add instruments only the new ones; the existing ones stay untouched.

See also

• setup — full first-run orchestration (discover + cards + instrument + smoke)
• agents — manage the resulting Agent Card store
• harness — inspect and smoke-test the per-agent capture path
• Coverage levels — what full, partial, basic mean