Introduction - Sprout for Builders

What is Sprout?

Sprout is the operating system for the family, driven by your home agent and the Sprout agent.

You connect your agent once over OAuth. From then on it reads and writes family state through the Sprout MCP: pull the roster, ship a task to your kid, save a skill, schedule a recurring check-in. The kid does the thing, earns gems, spends them on rewards or screen-time. Sprout runs the surface and the economy. You run everything else.

Sprout is an MCP-guided service, not an API you wire by hand. Your agent reads the live tool catalog and the authoring guide at runtime, so these pages are the map, not the spec. They tell you what the pieces are, where the seams sit, and what bites. The exact call signatures live in the MCP.

Your agent is the bridge to your home systems. The Sprout agent works the inside.

The cast

Two agents drive. The Sprout apps surface it. Sprout Systems orchestrates.

Your agent. Makes decisions with data outside Sprout. Lives in your home systems. Talks to Sprout over MCP.
The Sprout agent. Powers in-app moments for your kids. An assistant inside the Sprout apps for parents.
Parent app. Parents' window into the family. Setup, oversight, the human-in-the-loop moments.
Kid app. Where your kids experience Sprout. They explore, build habits, and earn what's next.
Sprout Systems. The platform and the data underneath it all. Routes between the agents and the apps, and guides the agents with the live tool catalog and authoring resources.

For where the lines are drawn and the failure modes you will hit, see The cast.

Start here

Three pages, in order. By the end you have a skill in your library and a working task on a kid's iPad.

Plug your agent in

Add the Sprout MCP to your client and complete the OAuth handshake. Works with Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, ChatGPT, anything MCP.

claude mcp add --transport http sprout https://api.sproutgoodhabits.com/mcp

Your first task

Read the family, create a conversation task. Two MCP calls; no skill, no canvas. Lands on the kid's iPad.

Save it as a skill

Wrap the procedure into a reusable skill so your agent can update today's chat with real context each morning.

The nouns

The pieces your agent works with. Eight that round out a family's day. See the full map →

Task

The kid-facing moment. A check-in chat, a chore, an interactive challenge. Every kid touchpoint is a task.

Skill

Your agent's family skill book. Save a procedure, parameterize it, invoke it tomorrow with new context.

Canvas

Interactive moments inside a task. Mini-games, drills, custom widgets, anything you can render. When text isn't enough.

Heartbeat

How Sprout keeps a rhythm. Cron-driven today; event-driven soon. The trigger that wakes the Sprout agent to refresh, post, or act.

Reward

What kids work for. Gems earned per task, spent on parent-defined rewards. The loop that makes habits stick.

Screen-time

The screen-time bouncer. Kids request time; your agent reviews, approves, or steers them somewhere else.

Activity

The family feed for parents. Tasks completed, skills run, gems earned, screen-time requests. Every kid update in one place. Soon streamed live to your home agent so it can react in real time.

SoonProgram

A way to group tasks so kids see a coherent path, not the whole list at once. Useful for habit ladders, learning paths, and project-based work.

On our roadmap

The next moves that widen what your agent can do for your family. If a docs page hints at one of these, you're seeing it land in real time.

Camera as a first-class task type. runMode: "camera" for ask-for-a-clip moments and on-device challenges.
Storage-backed canvas experiences. Canvases that remember. Persistent kid-scoped state, save progress across sessions, build on what came before.
Asset-backed canvases. sprout.uploadAsset for photos, clips, and other artifacts captured inside an activity; the upload becomes part of the task's completion proof.
A cross-family skill library. Great skills travel. Subscribe to the ones other families' agents use; share your own.
Live agent ↔ kid moments. Realtime threads, voice, and live coaching between your home agent and the kid surface.
Village apps. Coach, tutor, grandparent agents joining the family with scoped access.

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