Ferment: Quickstart

This quickstart walks you through creating a ferment, reviewing the plan, executing it, and monitoring progress. By the end, you'll have a running autonomous project that the harness manages across sessions.

Before you start

The Kimchi harness is installed and running — see Getting started if you haven't set it up yet.
You have a Kimchi API key configured.

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Ferment runs with --yolo permissions so that subagent workers can execute autonomously. Your control points are the scoping plan (Step 2) and phase boundaries in manual mode (Step 3).

Create and run your first ferment

One-shot mode

For smaller, well-defined tasks that don't need interactive confirmation:

/ferment one-shot "Add OpenAPI spec export to the REST API"

This creates a ferment, scopes it automatically, and begins execution without any prompts. Useful for CI pipelines, scripted workflows, or tasks where you trust the agent to handle the full scope.

What's next

Ferment concepts

Understand the mental model: phases, grading, decisions, memories, and parallel execution.

Ferment reference

Full command reference, environment variables, lifecycle states, and headless usage.