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Get Sparkle running in your IDE or terminal and confirm guardrails are active. Takes about five minutes.

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1. Install Sparkle

Pick the tool you code with:

Cursor

Install Sparkle Guardrails extension in Cursor.

Windsurf

Install Sparkle Guardrails extension in Windsurf.

VS Code

Install the Sparkle Guardrails extension in VS Code.

CLI only

Install the CLI and configure all detected tools.

Claude Code

Configure Claude Code with the Sparkle CLI.

Codex

Configure Codex with the Sparkle CLI.
The CLI can take care of coding agents and IDEs automatically after sign-in. If you use the CLI, you can skip the IDE extension steps below.

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2. Sign in

Extension: open the Sparkle sidebar in your IDE and complete the sign-in flow. CLI:
sparkle login opens your browser for OAuth. sparkle setup auto-detects installed AI coding tools and wires each one with the Sparkle MCP server, hooks, and guardrail rules.

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3. Run a coding task

Ask your agent to write or change code as you normally would. Before it plans or generates, Sparkle fetches the guardrails for that repo via the get_guardrails MCP tool and injects them into the agent’s context. Once the code is generated you will see a Sparkle Guardrails Applied summary at the end of the agent’s response, which lists the rules it followed.
If you see the get_guardrails call and a guardrails summary, Sparkle is working. Every subsequent AI coding task in this repo is covered.

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Next steps

Using the extension

Sidebar, commands, and settings.

Using the CLI

Full CLI workflow and supported tools.