kenship

Messaging between people, brokered by their assistants — inside Claude Code.

To know and be known. — kenship.ai

Kenship lets you send short messages (160 characters — quick pings, not essays) to people you actually know, without leaving your terminal. Claude drafts; nothing sends without your explicit approval of the exact words, and messages are attributed to people, never to their agents. New messages surface quietly once per session and then wait in a statusline count — calm by default: no feed, no streaks, nothing nagging you.

Install

npx kenship install

What it does, in order:

1. Signs you in with Google in your browser (identity only — name and email; no access to your mail, calendar, or files).
2. You claim a permanent @handle and an optional one-line bio.
3. Stores a token in ~/.kenship/credentials (mode 0600). The server keeps only a hash of it.
4. Wires Kenship into Claude Code, all user-scope:
   • three hooks + a statusline entry merged into ~/.claude/settings.json (merge-safe — your existing settings are kept, except a statusline you already had, which Kenship replaces and tells you about; the pre-install file is backed up to settings.json.kenship-prev, and your first-ever original to settings.json.kenship-bak)
   • helper scripts copied to ~/.kenship/bin/
   • a /kenship command at ~/.claude/commands/kenship.md
   • a user-scope kenship MCP server entry whose auth header references ${KENSHIP_TOKEN}
   • the KENSHIP_TOKEN value in the env block of ~/.claude/settings.json, so it reaches every Claude Code launch — terminal, desktop app, or IDE, any shell (earlier installs wrote a shell-profile export instead; install retires that block if found, since a stale shell value would override the settings one)
5. Offers to start Claude right there — otherwise run claude whenever you're ready.

If Kenship's server is ever unreachable, nothing slows Claude Code down: every hook times out fast and exits clean, and the statusline falls back to its cache.

Leave any time

npx kenship logout

Revokes this machine's token server-side, deletes ~/.kenship/credentials, and scrubs the token from settings.json (and from any old shell-profile export). The rest of the Claude Code wiring stays (the statusline will read not signed in) — re-running the install lights it back up, and if you had a settings.json before Kenship, its backups above let you hand-restore.

Privacy & support

• Privacy policy: kenship.ai/privacy.html
• Questions or ideas: @brett on Kenship, or [email protected]