Join a Team Brain

This guide is for a person joining a Team Brain that someone else administers. You do not join another person’s workspace. You create or repair your own workspace, receive membership in the shared Brain, and connect the two.

1. Set up your own workspace

Complete Individual workspace setup first. The workspace remains useful even if the Brain connection is delayed or declined.

Note

If you already have a workspace, use aios onboard --inspect --json and aios update --preview. Do not create a second workspace just to join a Brain.

2. Accept the Team Brain invitation

A Team Brain admin creates or re-invites your member record. The admin can use the Brain dashboard or run this from an AIOS toolkit/workspace with an admin API key:

aios member invite you@example.com --name "Your Name" --handle you \
  --role member --tools all

The command issues either a magic-link email or a manual sign-in credential and best-effort cascades invitations to configured tools such as Linear, Slack, and GitHub. A tool invitation failure does not block Brain membership.

Caution

This command invites you to the Team Brain and configured external tools. It does not grant access to the admin’s personal workspace repository.

3. Create your per-machine API key

After signing into the Brain dashboard, open My API keys and create a key. Dashboard sign-in and CLI authentication are separate. The key is shown once and has the form aios_<key_id>_<secret>.

Put it in the scaffolded workspace’s gitignored .env:

AIOS_API_KEY=aios_<key_id>_<secret>

4. Connect your workspace

1. Inspect, then run the guided Join path

   aios onboard --inspect --json
   aios onboard

   The wizard normalizes the candidate Brain URL, displays the canonical origin, and waits for your approval before saving it. The API key is authoritative for team identity; team_id is optional.

   It may also ask whether you are actively building a codebase with AI. Answering Yes opts this workspace into the optional GitHub Actions code-health workflow; answering No leaves that workflow out. This choice is separate from whether you are a consultant, employee, or business owner.

2. Validate identity

   aios whoami

   This calls GET /api/v1/me. Onboarding never runs aios push.

3. Preview the first share

   aios status
   aios push --dry-run

4. Push only after review

   aios push
   aios query "what decisions did we make this week?"

Only tier-eligible content on whitelisted paths can leave the machine. Untagged and admin content is blocked locally; the Brain independently rejects admin content.

For administrators

See Team admin setup for Brain deployment, the admin account, and the member invitation sequence.