> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.yertle.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Introduction

> Yertle is a collaborative visual workspace for building and managing software architectures.

## What is Yertle?

Yertle is a collaborative visual workspace for designing, documenting, and exploring software systems. It combines a Git-like content-addressing backend with a real-time visual canvas, giving teams the power to model complex architectures with full version history, branching, and merging.

Think of it as **GitHub for system architecture diagrams** — every change is a commit, every branch is a parallel exploration, and every node is a versioned, queryable object.

## Why an API and docs?

This documentation site is for developers building on top of Yertle. You can:

* **Script your workspace** with the Yertle [CLI](/tools/cli)
* **Connect AI agents** through the Yertle [MCP server](/tools/mcp)
* **Build custom integrations** using the [REST API](/api-reference/overview)

Everything you can do in the Yertle web app, you can do programmatically.

## Where to go next

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="Quickstart" icon="rocket" href="/quickstart">
    Get from zero to your first API call in five minutes.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Core Concepts" icon="book" href="/concepts">
    Understand orgs, nodes, branches, commits, and the Git-like model.
  </Card>

  <Card title="Authentication" icon="key" href="/authentication">
    Learn how to authenticate API requests with JWT bearer tokens.
  </Card>

  <Card title="API Reference" icon="code" href="/api-reference/overview">
    Browse every endpoint with request/response schemas and examples.
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Open source tools

The Yertle CLI and MCP server are open source on GitHub:

* [model-context/yertle-cli](https://github.com/model-context/yertle-cli) — Go CLI distributed via Homebrew
* [model-context/yertle-mcp](https://github.com/model-context/yertle-mcp) — Model Context Protocol server

Contributions welcome.