Quick Start

The fastest path into Albumi is to let an AI agent do the entry work. You bring existing documentation — a wiki page, a spreadsheet, a README, architecture notes — and the agent turns it into applications, integrations, data objects, and business capabilities. You review the result as an Architecture Change Request and approve what you want to keep.

If you would rather enter data by hand from the start, follow Manual Start. The rest of this page assumes the AI path.

1. Sign up

Go to albumi.app/early-access and create an account. You get a workspace immediately — no approval queue. Name it something your organization will recognize; you can rename later.

2. Connect your AI agent

Albumi exposes itself to AI agents as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server. It runs on your machine, authenticates to your workspace, and gives the agent four tools: pull, validate, audit, and push.

Authenticate once:

npx @albumi/mcp login

A browser window opens, you confirm, and the CLI stores a token at ~/.albumi/credentials.json.

Register the server with your agent. For Claude Code:

claude mcp add albumi -- npx @albumi/mcp

Cursor, Claude Desktop, and other MCP-compatible clients use their own registration format — see MCP Server Setup for the exact configuration. Node.js 20+ is the only prerequisite.

3. Generate a landscape from your documents

Open a conversation with your agent and point it at whatever you have. Examples that work:

“Here is our architecture wiki page. Create a complete Albumi workspace — applications, integrations, data objects, and business capabilities. Then run validate and audit.”

“Attached is a spreadsheet with our application list. Import them. Infer business criticality and hosting type from the descriptions.”

“We run Salesforce (CRM), SAP (ERP), and a custom data warehouse. Salesforce sends customer data to SAP daily via REST. SAP sends financial data to the warehouse nightly by batch file. Model this.”

The agent produces a workspace with valid identifiers, referential integrity, and all required fields. The more specific your input, the better the result — see Generate Architecture for what makes a good source document.

4. Review the Architecture Change Request

The agent does not write directly into your landscape. It opens a pull request against your architecture — an Architecture Change Request (ACR) — and pushes the generated content there. You review the ACR in the UI, adjust anything the agent got wrong, approve, and implement.

See Governance Overview for how ACRs work end-to-end. The short version: nothing enters your landscape until you approve it.

5. What to do next

With a first draft in place:

• Key Concepts — the five building blocks of Albumi, if you have not read them yet.
• Entities Overview — how the seven entity types relate and which to reach for when the choice is not obvious.
• AI Use Cases — prompt patterns for incremental updates, impact briefings, audits, and migration planning.
• Manual Start — if you want to continue without the agent.