Orbitron

Kinetis does not hand you a generic dashboard or force your application into a prebuilt scaffold. It gives you something more adaptable: Orbitron, the development harness that equips your chosen AI coding agent with this project’s own Kinetis context, package inspection, layout verification, controlled scaffolding, and the current Kinetis documentation — all on one connection.

kinetis/orbitron is a development-only harness, not an agent: it contains no model, talks to none, and generates no application of its own. You bring the coding agent; Orbitron gives it the facts to build against — the packages and versions actually installed in this project, not whatever an agent recalls from training. None of what it returns is evidence that your application code is correct — Agent Correctness Review and your own test suite are.

Reach it either way: any agent that can run a shell uses four commands on vendor/bin/kinetis, and an agent that speaks MCP registers vendor/bin/kinetis-orbitron-mcp and calls the same documents as tools, plus this documentation as resources on that same connection. Both adapt the same services, so neither can report something the other does not. Appendix: Orbitron has the complete contract — every command’s schema, every MCP tool, and the exact files a project wires in.

Start a new project

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/app -w /app composer:2 \
    create-project --no-install kinetis/skeleton my-app
cd my-app
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up --build -d

kinetis/skeleton arrives with Orbitron already wired in — the MCP server registration, the agent contract, everything below is already checked in. From here:

1. Open or reconnect your MCP-capable coding agent in this directory — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, or any other client that reads AGENTS.md and can launch a stdio MCP server.

2. Approve the project-local orbitron server the first time your client asks. These checked-in files register a server; they change no trust or approval policy of their own, so your client’s usual policy decides.

3. Give your agent its first request. On the earliest turn its orbitron tools and resources are available — ordinarily its first, once you have approved the server — it initializes Orbitron before touching anything else, then reports:

   Orbitron ready — kinetis/framework <installed-version>, layout pass (App\, App\Tests\).
   

   That line means the agent read this project’s real installed versions and verified layout instead of guessing. Only after it does your request.

An agent with a shell does step 1 for you if the stack is not already up. Steps 2 and 3 depend on you: an agent cannot reconnect the client it is running inside, and it cannot grant its own approval — one that cannot do either says so and waits rather than working around it.

Add it to an existing project

composer require --dev kinetis/orbitron

Then check in the same four pieces the skeleton ships: bin/orbitron-mcp (a one-file Docker bridge, when the project runs in containers), AGENTS.md (the whole agent contract), CLAUDE.md/GEMINI.md as one-line imports of it, and one MCP configuration file per client (.mcp.json, .codex/config.toml, .gemini/settings.json). None of this widens any trust or approval — it registers a server and nothing else. Appendix: Orbitron’s Equip an existing project has every file verbatim.

A shell-only agent loses nothing: the same four documents are commands under vendor/bin/kinetis, run inside the container that has them installed:

docker compose exec app vendor/bin/kinetis orbitron:context
docker compose exec app vendor/bin/kinetis orbitron:inspect
docker compose exec app vendor/bin/kinetis orbitron:verify
docker compose exec app vendor/bin/kinetis orbitron:scaffold

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Start here
The server fails to start	docker compose up --build -d, then reconnect your client — the stack has not completed its initial setup
The server was there and is gone	Docker stopped, or the client itself ended — reconnect it; restarting app alone does not cause this
The server shows as disconnected	Run the launcher by hand; a handshake reply means the client side — trust, approval, or a stale tool catalog — is what to check
orbitron_verify reports error	Your composer.json layout is outside what Orbitron admits — the failed check’s code names why
A documentation read fails	The fetch to the documentation origin failed — every other document is local and unaffected

Appendix: Orbitron’s 8. Diagnostics covers every symptom, with the exact commands to run.

See also

• Appendix: Orbitron — the complete contract: every command’s schema and exit codes, the installed-source tools, the full MCP catalogue, and the trust boundary.

• Agent Workflow — where your agent routes a task once Orbitron is ready.

• MCP Documentation Server — the documentation server Orbitron composes for the kinetis://docs/* resources, installable on its own without the harness.