PAPI

Your AI starts every session from zero. Your project stays on course.

AI coding tools are great at writing code and terrible at holding a direction. Scope grows, plans change, and the decisions behind them get made in a chat window and lost there. PAPI keeps the project on course. It gives your assistant structured plan, build, review and release cycles, plus a decision trail recording what was chosen, what was dropped, and why. Your assistant writes and reads it while it works, so it stays current without anyone maintaining it.

You connect it once. From then on, your assistant starts every session knowing which cycle you're on, what's in flight, and what to do next.

Free to start. The whole plan → build → review → release loop, on up to three projects, no card. Free runs a real project start to finish; it isn't a trial. Pricing.

What this repo is. Documentation, install guides, and the issue tracker. PAPI's engine is closed source and hosted — you connect to it, you don't build it from here. The @papi-ai/server package on npm is the supported local runtime. The contents of this repo are MIT.

Quick start

Let your AI install it. Paste this to your assistant — Cursor, Claude Code, Windsurf, Codex, VS Code, or any other MCP client:

Read https://getpapi.ai/llms.txt and set up PAPI

Your assistant reads the runbook and walks you through the whole first run: checking it's in the right project folder, connecting, setting up your project, planning your first cycle, and building your first task. It works in coding tools and in chat apps like claude.ai and ChatGPT, and you don't need to be a developer. (The same runbook lives in this repo as llms.txt and llms-install.md if your assistant can't fetch URLs.)

The one thing only you can do. You need a free account at getpapi.ai. After that there are two ways to connect:

• Connection token (default). Open the Connect panel on getpapi.ai, copy the project id and connection token under "This is your project", and hand them to your assistant. It puts them in your tool's config and PAPI works straight away, with no browser step.
• Browser sign-in. Your assistant adds the server and you approve it in the browser. No assistant can click through that screen for you, and until you do the server shows Needs authentication.

Most tools only load a new connection when a conversation starts, so open a fresh conversation after connecting and ask your assistant to run orient.

Prefer to wire it up yourself?

In Claude Code, the shortest path is the plugin — two lines, nothing to copy or edit:

/plugin marketplace add getpapi/papi
/plugin install papi@papi

The plugin carries the server config, plus two skills: check-mcp diagnoses a connection that isn't working, and papi-verify health-checks the current cycle.

Every tool also takes the same streamable-HTTP endpoint directly, https://mcp.getpapi.ai/mcp. In Claude Code that's:

claude mcp add --transport http papi https://mcp.getpapi.ai/mcp

Either way, finish with /mcp → papi → Authenticate. Or skip the browser step entirely with the connection token from the Connect panel:

claude mcp add --transport http papi https://mcp.getpapi.ai/mcp --header "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_CONNECTION_TOKEN" --header "x-papi-project-id: YOUR_PROJECT_ID"

DeepSeek Harness users can install the repository-owned bundle after creating a PAPI connection token:

dsh plugin --profile web add @papi-ai/deepseek-harness

See PAPI for DeepSeek Harness for token handling, verification, compatibility, and removal.

Per-tool config for Cursor, VS Code, Windsurf, Codex, and any generic MCP client is in docs/install.md.

What you get

• plan breaks your goals into a cycle of right-sized tasks, each with a build handoff your assistant can execute directly.
• build tracks what was built, what surprised you, and what was discovered along the way.
• review and release close the loop, so every cycle feeds the next plan.
• strategy reviews every few cycles step back and check direction, not just velocity.
• A dashboard at getpapi.ai shows your cycles, board, and decisions, so you can see the state of the project without asking.

The methodology is the product: a plan, build, review, release loop your assistant runs with you, with memory that compounds. PAPI has been built with PAPI for every cycle in the badge above.

The hub opens on one question — what happens next. The cycle's progress through plan, build, review and release sits under it.

The board is the full picture. Your assistant writes to it as a side effect of working, so it is current without anyone maintaining it.

How this differs from a tracker

Unlike Linear, Jira, Asana or Notion, this was not built for humans and then opened to agents. Those boards assume a human writes the ticket and a human reads it, in a tab your AI can't see. PAPI's board is written and read by your assistant as a side effect of working: starting a build opens the task, finishing it files the report, releasing closes the cycle. You approve the plan and you sign off the review. The ticket admin in between is the part that disappears. You manage the outcome, not the keystrokes.

Unlike Taskmaster and other in-repo task files, PAPI's state isn't a file one tool generates once and then drifts from. It's hosted and structured — cycles, build reports, review verdicts, and Active Decisions carrying confidence levels that change as evidence arrives. The same project memory is there from Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code, or Codex, so switching tools doesn't reset your context, and last cycle's learnings are an input to the next plan rather than something you have to remember to mention.

Neither of those is a knock on the tools. They're solving a different problem to the one that breaks every time your assistant opens a fresh window.

Active Decisions are the part a task tracker has no field for: what was decided, why, what was rejected, and when to revisit it. Confidence moves as evidence arrives.

Every cycle leaves a trail, so the reasoning behind the project is still there months later — including for the assistant reading it back.

Tools

PAPI exposes these MCP tools to your assistant. The whole loop is a handful of calls.

Core loop

• orient — one call returns the current cycle, what's in flight, and the recommended next action. Run it at the start of every session.
• setup — scaffold PAPI onto a new project.
• plan — break goals into a cycle of right-sized tasks, each with a build handoff your assistant can execute directly.
• build_list — list the current cycle's tasks and their handoffs.
• build_execute — start a task (creates a branch and handoff) and complete it (records the build report).
• review_list / review_submit — surface finished builds and record accept / request-changes / reject verdicts.
• release / close_cycle — finish the cycle, with a published version (release) or without one (close_cycle).
• tutorial_mode — turn on short explanations and one clear next step in every reply. Handy for your first few cycles.

Board and backlog

• board_view — read the project board and any task.
• board_edit — change a task's status, cycle, priority, or notes.
• ad_hoc — record quick work done outside the cycle so it shows in project history.
• idea — capture a feature, bug, or research note into the backlog.
• bug — file a bug against the board.

Strategy and intelligence

• strategy_review — step back every few cycles to check direction, not just velocity.
• strategy_change — record an Active Decision, with supersede history.
• zoom_out — a periodic retrospective across many cycles.

Docs and projects

• doc_register / doc_search — register and find project reference docs.
• project_list / project_switch / project_create — manage multiple PAPI projects.

Teams

• join — join a project a teammate invited you to.
• contributor_list / contributor_add — see and manage who works on the project.

Documentation

In this repo:

Doc	What it covers
llms.txt	The agent runbook — point your AI at this (live version: getpapi.ai/llms.txt)
llms-install.md	Per-tool install instructions for AI assistants
docs/install.md	Install paths for every supported tool
docs/how-it-works.md	Cycles, handoffs, decisions, and how the pieces fit
docs/troubleshooting.md	Connection problems, project routing, common fixes

Full documentation on the website — no account needed:

Page	What it covers
Quick Start	Zero to your first cycle plan in under 5 minutes
Workflow	The full plan → build → review → release loop
Concepts	Cycles, handoffs, Active Decisions — the vocabulary
Cheat Sheet	Every command on one page
Tool Reference	Every PAPI MCP tool with parameters and use cases
Troubleshooting	Connection and auth first aid
Handbook	For teams: reading dashboards, cycle reports, review flow

Community and support

Stuck, or something's broken? Open an issue — there are templates for each case, and the connection problem one is the one to reach for if PAPI won't connect or won't authenticate, which is where people get stuck most:

• Connection problem · Bug report · Question · Feature request
• Discord is faster for questions, and release notes land there first.
• CONTRIBUTING.md covers what a useful report looks like and what a docs PR can change.
• Found a vulnerability? Don't open an issue — SECURITY.md has the private channel.

Star the repo

If PAPI is useful to you, star it. That's the whole ask, and it's how other people building with AI assistants find it.

Links

• Website and dashboard: getpapi.ai
• Pricing: getpapi.ai/pricing — free tier, no card
• What shipped in each cycle: getpapi.ai/changelog
• Data, access, and what PAPI doesn't have yet: getpapi.ai/trust
• Licence: the contents of this repo (docs, guides, config examples, Dockerfile) are MIT. That licence covers this repository only — not the PAPI engine, and not the PAPI name or logo, which are trademarks.