Get Started
In this section
Cozy pixel-art scene of a desk and computer with a glowing cyan DNA helix rising from the screen — a new aDNA workspace coming alive

Illustration generated with Google Imagen 4 Ultra (imagen-4.0-ultra-generate-001) in the ss-ghibli-pixel / Tokyo Night register, commissioned under ADR-032 and now governed by ADR-053.

Get Started

Set up your own aDNA workspace — a local, agent-readable home for every project's context — in about 5 minutes. The workspace is files on your machine and makes no network calls of its own.

What this command does, before you run it

git clone https://github.com/aDNA-Network/aDNA.git ~/aDNA && cd ~/aDNA && claude

  • Writes one directory: ~/aDNA/. Nothing outside it — no system settings, no PATH changes, no daemon, no login item. If you would rather not use that path, clone anywhere: nothing in the workspace depends on its location, and ~/aDNA is only the default the docs assume.
  • The && claude starts an agent in that directory, which reads the instruction files you just cloned — CLAUDE.md at the root, and the standard in .adna/. That is the real trust question here, and it is a fair one: these files are prompt-ware, and prompt-ware is executed by the agent that reads it.
  • So read them first. Every file the agent reads on first run, annotated → They are shown verbatim, at a pinned commit, with hashes you can check against your own clone.
  • The workspace sends nothing anywhere. No account, no telemetry, no network call after the clone — it is plain Markdown on your disk. Your agent is a separate question, and the command above starts one: the trailing && claude launches Claude Code, which needs an Anthropic account and sends the files it reads to Anthropic. That is the agent's network behaviour, not the workspace's — and you can skip it, open the files in any editor, and the workspace still works.
  • This is a Claude Code convention. The workspace is plain Markdown that any tool can read, but this one-command flow assumes Claude Code specifically. Other agents can read the same files; they will not run this command.
  • To undo it: rm -rf ~/aDNA. There is nothing else to uninstall.

1. Clone the workspace

The clone is your workspace — not a template you copy from. The router comes pre-instantiated and the standard comes embedded; there is nothing to bootstrap by hand. 

git clone https://github.com/aDNA-Network/aDNA.git ~/aDNA

2. Start Claude Code

Run claude in the workspace. The agent reads the router, sees a fresh workspace with no projects yet, and walks you through creating your first one: 

cd ~/aDNA
claude

With no project in the workspace yet, the router sends the agent to the standard's project-fork skill, which scaffolds <your_project>.aDNA/ — its triad of what/ · how/ · who/, its governance files, and its own git history. It then offers to run an onboarding interview that customises the new project for your domain; you can take it now or leave it for the first session inside the project. When the scaffolding finishes, your workspace looks like this: 

~/aDNA/
├── CLAUDE.md            # workspace router (ships with the clone)
├── .adna/               # the standard, embedded (read-only)
└── my_project.aDNA/     # your first project — a context graph
    ├── CLAUDE.md        # the project's own governance
    ├── what/            # knowledge: context, decisions, artifacts
    ├── how/             # operations: sessions, missions, skills
    └── who/             # people: roles, coordination

From here, work happens inside projects: cd my_project.aDNA && claude and the agent picks up that project's governance automatically.

3. Check it worked

"It worked" should be something you can verify, not something you feel. Five commands — the first two print nothing and exit 0 on success; the last three print your vault list, your project's contents, and its first commit: 

test -f ~/aDNA/CLAUDE.md            # the router your agent reads first
test -d ~/aDNA/.adna                # the standard, embedded and read-only
ls -d ~/aDNA/*.aDNA                 # at least one project vault exists
ls ~/aDNA/<name>.aDNA/what ~/aDNA/<name>.aDNA/how ~/aDNA/<name>.aDNA/who
git -C ~/aDNA/<name>.aDNA log      # its own history, separate from the image's

Replace <name> with whatever you called your project. That the last one has its own git log — not the workspace image's — is the check people most often skip and the one that matters: your context graph is your repository from the first commit.

Then the half that is actually the point. Open a new agent session inside <name>.aDNA/ and ask it something about the project. It should already know where it is and what the project's governance says, without you telling it where to look. The five commands prove files were written; this proves the thing the standard exists for.

If something goes wrong

The surface here is small — a clone and an agent launch — so the list of ways it fails is short. These are the failures the two commands can actually produce:

  • claude: command not found — Claude Code is not installed, or not on your PATH. Install it with npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code and open a new shell.
  • fatal: destination path '~/aDNA' already exists — you already have a workspace there. Either work in it, or clone somewhere else; nothing depends on the path.
  • The agent does not seem to know about aDNA. It is almost always started in the wrong directory. The router is CLAUDE.md at the workspace root, so cd ~/aDNA first — an agent launched from your home directory reads nothing.
  • You want to check what the agent is acting on. Every file it reads on first run is published here verbatim, with hashes to compare against your clone.

This list is short because it is drawn from what the commands can do, not from a support inbox. It will grow as real installs are recorded.

Removing it

rm -rf ~/aDNA — and that is the whole uninstall. Nothing was installed outside that directory, so there is no package to remove, no configuration to revert, and no service to stop. If you moved your projects elsewhere first, they are ordinary git repositories and keep working.

Next steps

You just built a node in a living network. Grow it — then see where it connects: