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Set Up Parallel

This guide enables Parallel for a single project: the four CLI-backed skills by default, with the optional MCP overlay layered on top when you want it.

Parallel ships in two layers:

  • default: CLI-backed shared skills, derived per project from extensions.parallel.skills
  • optional: globally enabled parallel-search and parallel-task MCP servers

The four default skills are:

  • parallel-web-search
  • parallel-web-extract
  • parallel-deep-research
  • parallel-data-enrichment

All four assume parallel-cli is installed and authenticated on your machine. drwn does not install or authenticate parallel-cli.

Install And Authenticate Parallel​

Install the upstream CLI:

curl -fsSL https://parallel.ai/install.sh | bash

Authenticate:

parallel-cli login
parallel-cli auth

Preview Project Setup​

From the project root:

drwn extensions setup parallel --dry-run

This previews the project config write under <project>/.agents/drwn/config.json without mutating anything.

Enable The Skills For This Project​

drwn extensions add parallel
drwn write --dry-run
drwn write

drwn write then derives the four Parallel skills for this project without needing a machine skill selection.

Add The MCP Overlay (Project Scope)​

To turn on parallel-search and parallel-task for the current project only:

drwn extensions add parallel --mcp
drwn mcp write --dry-run
drwn mcp write

Enable The MCP Overlay Globally​

The project-scoped MCP toggle above does not flip the global switch. To enable Parallel MCP across every project, edit registry/config.json:

"parallel": {
  "cli": { "enabled": true },
  "mcp": { "enabled": true }
}

Then materialize:

drwn mcp write

Verify​

drwn extensions status parallel
drwn extensions doctor parallel
drwn mcp list

Status and doctor report missing CLI or MCP prerequisites without mutating state. drwn does not authenticate parallel-cli for you; if status reports the CLI as missing or unauthenticated, rerun the install and auth steps above.

See Also​