Overview
There are four ways people typically arrive at drwn. Each has a dedicated page with prerequisites, steps, and verification. Pick the one that matches what you are trying to do.
Use a Team's Harness
You joined a project or a team that already publishes a mind card and you want to consume it. The card encodes which skills, MCP servers, and extensions the team has agreed on; you install it into the project and let drwn write materialize the downstream state. This path is right for you when somebody else owns the harness intent and you just need to run it.
See Use a Team's Harness.
Set Up Your Machine
You are installing drwn for the first time on a personal machine and want a sensible baseline before any project-specific work. This path walks through the install, the initial inventory inspection, and how to add machine-wide defaults so that a fresh drwn write in any project starts from a known set of skills and MCP servers. This path is right for you when there is no team harness yet and you are setting up your own defaults.
See Set Up Your Machine.
Override for One Project
Your machine defaults are fine for most work, but one project needs a different effective harness — maybe a different MCP server, an extension only that project should use, or a skill the rest of your machine should not have. This path walks through scaffolding a project overlay that suppresses the machine defaults inside that project and produces a project-scoped downstream state. This path is right for you when you want isolation without rewriting your machine.
Author and Publish a Card
You want to package a harness — yours or your team's — as a reusable, versioned card others can consume. This path covers creating a source, adding skills and MCP servers, setting metadata and quality signals, and publishing the card to the local store (and optionally a Git remote). This path is right for you when you are the one defining the harness intent for someone else.