| name | latitude-setup |
| description | Zero-account onboarding orchestrator for Latitude. Bootstrap a temporary Latitude account from the terminal (no signup), instrument the app for tracing, verify real traces, clean up, and hand back a browser link to claim ownership. Use when someone wants to set up Latitude from scratch with no existing account or API key — the landing-page "try it with your agent" flow. If it turns out the user already has an account, API key, or connected Latitude MCP, this skill redirects to latitude-telemetry + latitude-cli instead of creating a temporary account. |
Latitude Setup (zero-account onboarding)
Orchestrates the from-scratch path: the user has no Latitude account and no API key. This skill provisions a temporary account via the CLI, instruments the app, verifies real traces, and returns a claim link the user opens in a browser to take ownership.
This skill depends on two others — latitude-cli (install + auth + command primitives) and latitude-telemetry (instrumentation). Read both; this skill only adds the orchestration between them.
Preflight: don't create a temporary account if the user already has one
The temporary-account bootstrap exists to make onboarding automatic for someone with nothing set up yet. But a user who already has a Latitude account can land on this skill by mistake — and routing them through a redundant temporary org plus a claim step is worth avoiding when you can. So before bootstrapping anything, infer from the environment whether an account already exists, and redirect instead of bootstrapping if it clearly does:
- An API key is already present —
LATITUDE_API_KEY set in the shell, in a .env (search the app root and its parents), in the app's secret manager, or in deployment/CI config.
- A Latitude MCP is connected and authenticated in this harness — an OAuth-authorized Latitude MCP means the user already has a workspace.
- Existing Latitude config/instrumentation in the repo — a
LATITUDE_PROJECT_SLUG, a @latitude-data/telemetry / latitude-telemetry dependency, or an OTLP exporter already pointed at ingest.latitude.so.
- The user says so — they mention being signed in, having a project, or already using Latitude.
If any of these hold → do NOT bootstrap. The user has an account; redirect to the direct path:
- Use
latitude-telemetry via its "invoked directly" entry point to audit and instrument the app against the existing key/project. Use latitude-cli if you still need to install/authenticate the CLI or discover the project slug (latitude projects list).
- Finish with
latitude-telemetry's verification step: run the user's real LLM flow and confirm the traces landed via the Latitude MCP, CLI, or API. Do not run this skill's bootstrap, claim-link, or delete-and-recreate cleanup — those belong only to the temporary-account flow, and the cleanup would destroy a project the user actually owns.
If genuinely nothing is set up (no key, no MCP, no existing config) → proceed with the temporary-account flow below.
If you can't confidently tell either way → default to bootstrapping; don't stall on it. This detection is best-effort. A bootstrapped temporary organization is low-stakes and recoverable: the claim link lets it be redeemed later, and it can be claimed even into an account the user already has — so creating one for a user who turned out to already have an account is a minor, fixable outcome, not a failure. The overriding goal is to get the app instrumented and emitting real traces to Latitude autonomously; don't block that on perfect account detection. If the user is right there and a one-line question is cheap, you may confirm first — but absent a clear signal, bootstrap and keep going.
Ground rules
- Plan, then wait. Instrumentation goes through
latitude-telemetry's "present a plan, wait for explicit approval" contract. Do not edit app code before approval.
- Never print raw secrets. The bootstrap API key must never appear in chat, logs, or commits. The claim link is safe to show (it's the whole point) — the API key is not.
- One project, named once. Bootstrap creates exactly one project. There is no throwaway "testing" project; cleanup is delete + recreate with the same name (see step 7).
The flow
1. Install dependencies
Ensure the latitude-telemetry and latitude-cli skills are available, and install the latitude binary as described in latitude-cli → Install (OS/ARCH detection, download the matching release asset, place on PATH, chmod +x). Only cli-5.0.0 and later are the real Latitude CLI — latitude-cli explains why earlier cli-* tags must be ignored. Confirm with latitude --version (expect ≥ 5.0.0).
2. Bootstrap a temporary account
This is unauthenticated — no key needed yet. Infer a sensible project name from the app (and optionally an org name); ask the user for an email only if you want the claim link mailed to them.
First, discover the command's exact flags and response fields — don't assume the shape; it can change across versions:
latitude account bootstrap --schema
Keep the API key out of your own conversation. --format json prints the API key to stdout, which lands in the transcript. On a best-effort basis, capture the response to a scratch file instead of letting it print, then display everything except the secret:
latitude account bootstrap \
--project-name "<inferred project name>" \
--organization-name "<inferred org name>" \
--format json > ~/.latitude-bootstrap.json
jq 'del(.apiKey)' ~/.latitude-bootstrap.json
The flow relies on a few of the response fields, by role (confirm their exact names in --schema):
- the API key — an org-scoped secret; never print it. It flows straight into
.env in step 3, then the scratch file is deleted.
- the project slug — the single created project; your telemetry target and the cleanup handle (step 7).
- the claim link (plus its expiry, and the email it was sent to if you passed one) — handed back to the user in step 8.
3. Configure auth via .env
Write the key and project slug into the app's .env straight from the scratch file, so the value never prints. Make sure .env is gitignored. Replace any existing LATITUDE_* lines rather than duplicating them, then delete the scratch file:
touch .env
sed -i.bak '/^LATITUDE_API_KEY=/d;/^LATITUDE_PROJECT_SLUG=/d' .env && rm -f .env.bak
printf 'LATITUDE_API_KEY=%s\n' "$(jq -r .apiKey ~/.latitude-bootstrap.json)" >> .env
printf 'LATITUDE_PROJECT_SLUG=%s\n' "$(jq -r .projectSlug ~/.latitude-bootstrap.json)" >> .env
rm -f ~/.latitude-bootstrap.json
If any value you later add to .env contains spaces (not the key/slug — e.g. a header/token value), wrap it in double quotes: the CLI's .env parser rejects unquoted spaced values and stops, after which it won't read LATITUDE_API_KEY (see latitude-cli → Authentication).
LATITUDE_API_KEY authenticates both the latitude CLI (it auto-loads .env from the working directory and its parents) and the telemetry SDK — one entry, both consumers. Do not run latitude auth login; it invokes the OS keychain and can block on a prompt. Run subsequent latitude commands from the app root so .env is picked up. Do not echo the key back to the user.
Verify auth before going further (this catches the most common failure early):
latitude auth status
If it shows missing, .env isn't being applied — you're either not running from the app root (or a subdirectory), or an empty/stale LATITUDE_API_KEY in the shell is shadowing it (the .env load never overrides an already-set var). Fix the directory or unset the shadowing var, then re-check. See latitude-cli → Authentication.
4. Instrument the app (delegate to latitude-telemetry)
Hand off to latitude-telemetry to add instrumentation, pointing it at LATITUDE_PROJECT_SLUG=<projectSlug>. The key/slug are already provisioned and in .env, so skip that skill's MCP-config discovery detour — you have the values. Follow its audit → group → clarify → plan → wait for approval → implement steps. Do not edit code before the user approves the plan.
latitude-telemetry's workflow ends with its own "verify real traces land" step. In this orchestration that verification loop is steps 5–6 below — and step 7 then extends it with the temporary-account cleanup — so drive the trace-checking from here rather than verifying twice.
5. Run the user's real LLM flow
After instrumentation, run the user's actual code so real spans are emitted — not a synthetic span. Spans typically export on a batch interval, so they may take a short while to arrive — poll rather than expecting them instantly (step 6). Let the process finish or shut down gracefully so buffered spans flush; a hard kill can drop them. For short-lived scripts, ensure the SDK flushes before exit (see latitude-telemetry).
6. Inspect real traces and iterate
Poll the project's traces until the expected spans arrive, then verify quality:
latitude traces list --project-slug <projectSlug> --format json
Confirm model, token counts, message capture, and span boundaries look right. If instrumentation is wrong (missing spans, no token data, wrong boundaries), fix it and re-run the user's code. Loop until the traces are correct.
7. Clean the messy iteration traces — without touching app config
The verification loop leaves noisy traces. Wipe them by deleting and recreating the project with the same name, which yields the same slug — so LATITUDE_PROJECT_SLUG and all instrumentation stay valid and no config is re-edited:
latitude projects delete --project-slug <projectSlug>
latitude projects create --name "<the exact same project name from step 2>"
A successful projects delete returns HTTP 204 (no body), which the CLI renders as a placeholder like { bytes: 0, mimeType: text/plain, saved_file: download.txt, status: success } — that status: success is the delete succeeding, not an error or a file download. Then run the user's code once more to produce a single clean set of real traces. Confirm with latitude traces list again.
8. Hand back the claim link
Present the claim link to the user (safe to show) and tell them to open it in a browser to claim ownership of the temporary account — that makes them the owner and stops it from expiring. Mention its expiry (unclaimed temp accounts are deleted then). If you passed an email, note the link was also sent there.
Do not print the API key. The final state: instrumented app, one clean project of verified real traces, and a working claim link — with the user never having touched the Latitude UI first.
