What garden offers today, and how to install it

garden gives a coding agent maintained engineering guidance, published as immutable snapshots and read under an access key. It reaches an agent through three doors: the HTTP API (its guide), the garden command (its guide), and the local MCP server that comes with the command (its guide). garden stores, filters and delivers guidance; it ranks nothing, and the judgement of what to apply stays with your agent.

What is available today#

• The package is not published. The garden command and its MCP server are built locally as the package @fernworks/garden, in the file fernworks-garden-0.0.0.tgz. It is not published to npm or any other registry, and there is no public download.
• The hosted endpoint is active. garden's hosted endpoint is https://garden-api.fernworks.dev/. It serves current and historical publications to a valid access key.
• The beta is keyed and free. Every read of the guidance needs an access key, which Fernworks issues. There is no sign-up and no price.
• The harnesses. The MCP objective passed in Codex against the saved package and a fixture service; hosted current and historical reads were verified separately. Claude Code has no fresh proof against the current package and service. Every other client is unverified until it is proven.

What works without a key#

These need no key and no network:

• garden --help, garden help COMMAND and garden --version;
• garden capabilities, which answers the command's version, its result format, the six reads and the six MCP tools;
• garden mcp: the server starts, and an agent can list its six tools.

Every read of the guidance needs a key. Without one, the garden command and the MCP tools answer unauthorized and send nothing.

Installing from the package file#

The package is installed from its tarball. It needs Node.js 22.12.0 or later, and npm or pnpm. Installing it fetches its four runtime dependencies, commander, zod, @modelcontextprotocol/server and @modelcontextprotocol/core, from the npm registry. The package's notices state their terms.

npm install --global ./fernworks-garden-0.0.0.tgz
garden --version
garden capabilities

garden --version prints the package's version, and garden capabilities prints one garden.result/v1 document, with no key and no network.

Set your key and read:

export GARDEN_API_KEY=<your key>
garden snapshot --id current

To use garden from your coding agent, add the MCP server as the MCP guide shows.