First run
From install to first signed receipt in five minutes. Local agents first, remote/VPS attach as an optional second step.
The fastest path to a signed receipt is a single treeship setup. It detects the agents on your machine, draft Agent Cards for each, instruments the ones it can attach to, runs a smoke session to prove the trust-fabric pipeline works, and points you at treeship session start to capture your first real run.
Harnesses make agents observable. Cards make agents accountable. Receipts make their work verifiable.
Local agents first
Install Treeship
npm install -g treeshipOr via Homebrew, Cargo, or the binary download — see installation.
Initialize the workspace
treeship initThis creates ~/.treeship/ (or a project-local .treeship/ if you pass --config .treeship/config.json), generates an Ed25519 signing key, and writes the config that everything else reads.
Run setup
treeship setup --yestreeship setup runs four steps:
- Detect local agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Hermes, OpenClaw, Cline, Ninja Dev, generic MCP).
- Draft Agent Cards for each detection — one per surface per workspace, idempotent on re-run.
- Confirm and instrument the ones it can auto-attach to. Cards born from instrumentation move from Draft → Active.
- Smoke the trust-fabric pipeline (init → session start → wrap → close → package verify) inside an isolated tmpdir. Each instrumented harness moves Detected → Instrumented.
--yes skips the confirmation prompt. --skip-smoke instruments without smoking. --no-instrument only writes draft cards.
"Verified" is harness-specific. The setup smoke proves Treeship's signing pipeline works on this machine. It does not prove that any specific harness's capture path (Claude native hook, Cursor MCP, Codex shell-wrap) actually fires. That promotion to Verified is reserved for harness-specific smokes that exercise each capture signal individually. See Coverage levels for what each level actually claims.
Your first session
treeship session start --name "first run"
treeship wrap -- pytest tests/
treeship session close --summary "tests pass"Or just run your normal workflow with the agent of your choice — instrumented harnesses capture automatically, and git-reconcile at session close picks up anything that happened outside captured channels.
Read the report
treeship package inspect .treeship/sessions/ssn_*.treeshipThe report has three panels worth scanning first:
- Agent cards — every workspace agent, its harness, its status.
- Harness coverage — what each harness could capture vs what's been proven in this workspace.
- Files changed — every file the agent touched, tagged with the source that recorded it (
hook,mcp,git-reconcile,shell-wrap).
Remote / VPS / cloud agents come second
Once you have local value — a signed receipt you can read — you can attach agents that don't run on this machine: VPS-based Codex, cloud VMs, NinjaTech / SuperNinja remotes, CI runners.
The remote attach flow (treeship agent invite and treeship join --invite) is deferred to v0.9.9. Today, remote agents show up as draft cards with (none yet) for verified captures. treeship harness inspect ninjatech-superninja is honest about what's possible vs what's actually proven.
The current honest path for remote agents:
treeship agent register \
--name codex-vps \
--tools read_file,write_file,bash \
--description "Codex on vps-01"That writes a .agent package (signed certificate) and a card at needs-review. After v0.9.9 lands, treeship agent invite will replace this with a one-line join command on the remote machine.
What you'll see after setup
Cards (run treeship agents):
Agent cards (5 in workspace)
✓ Claude Code (claude-code, harness: claude-code, active)
✓ Cursor (cursor-agent, harness: cursor, active)
✓ Codex CLI (codex, harness: codex, active)
✓ OpenClaw (openclaw, harness: openclaw, active)
· SuperNinja (ninjatech-superninja, harness: ninjatech-superninja, draft)Harness coverage (run treeship harness list):
Harnesses (10 known)
✓ Claude Code Native Hook Harness id: claude-code coverage: high status: instrumented
✓ Cursor MCP Harness id: cursor coverage: medium status: instrumented
✓ Codex CLI MCP Harness id: codex coverage: medium status: instrumented
· NinjaTech / SuperNinja Remote id: ninjatech-superninja coverage: basic status: detected
...What's next
- Agent Cards — workspace trust objects.
- Agent Harnesses — how Treeship attaches.
- Coverage levels — what each tier actually proves.