Wire it once. It runs itself.

1. Get keys. Register a community and receive a sandbox key (ht_test_…) and, on go-live, a production key (ht_live_…).
2. Set tribe size. Keep the 3–5 default or tune with one PATCH /communities/settings call — study pods at 3–4, masterminds at 5–7.
3. Sync members. On Slack/Discord, joins and profile updates are picked up automatically. On your own platform, fire POST /members from your signup and profile events and backfill your existing roster once.
4. Run the first match. Trigger /hytribe match or POST /match. The engine forms tribes, queues anyone it couldn't place strongly yet, and returns a coverage report.
5. Let it run. Anton introduces each tribe, nudges quiet ones and surfaces at-risk ones. Re-run matching on any cadence.

# 1 · Register a community — returns your API key
curl -X POST https://api.hytribe.xyz/communities \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "name": "Indie Hackers NYC", "platform": "custom" }'

# 2 · Sync a member (fire from your signup / profile-update)
curl -X POST https://api.hytribe.xyz/members \
  -H "X-API-Key: ht_live_9f2c…" \
  -d '{ "platform_user_id": "U012AB",
        "profile_text": "founder, climbing, AI" }'

# 3 · Run matching — returns tribes
curl -X POST https://api.hytribe.xyz/match \
  -H "X-API-Key: ht_live_9f2c…"

{
  "tribes": [
    { "id": "trb_01", "members": ["U012AB","U023CD","U087QR","U118TT"] },
    { "id": "trb_02", "members": ["U033EF","U041GH","U059IJ"] }
  ],
  "compatibility_score": 0.94,
  "queued": [],
  "processing_time": "132ms"
}

Send authenticated example calls against the Hytribe sandbox and preview responses inline — no signup required. All calls hit synthetic data at sandbox.hytribe.xyz.

curl -X POST https://sandbox.hytribe.xyz/match \
  -H "X-API-Key: ht_test_9f2c_demo" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json"
  -d '{   "min_tribe_size": 3,   "max_tribe_size": 5 }'

All requests are authenticated with a per-community API key in the X-API-Key header over HTTPS. A key is scoped to a single community and can only read or write that community's data. Keys are stored hashed at rest and can be revoked immediately.

Subscribe to events per community. Payloads are signed with HMAC-SHA256; verify the X-Hytribe-Signature header before processing.

Hytribe is a plain REST surface — JSON in, JSON out, three calls to a working integration. Most teams wire it directly and skip a client library entirely.

Two-line install

If you'd rather not hand-roll requests, our Python and JavaScript clients are a one-command install:

pip install hytribe
npm install @hytribe/sdk

Both are thin wrappers over the same three endpoints, published so early integrators have something to install. The REST API is the contract; the client surface will change before then, so pin an exact version.

npm install @hytribe/sdk

import { Hytribe } from "@hytribe/sdk";
// 0.0.1 pre-release — pin an exact version

const hy = new Hytribe({ apiKey: process.env.HYTRIBE_API_KEY! });

// 1 · Register a community (once)
const community = await hy.communities.create({
  name: "Indie Hackers NYC",
  platform: "custom",
});

// 2 · Sync a member — idempotent on platform_user_id
await hy.members.upsert({
  platform_user_id: "U012AB",
  profile_text: "founder, climbing, AI",
});

// 3 · Run a match — returns tribes + coverage report
const { tribes, embedding_coverage } = await hy.match.run();

Other languages

Go, Rust, C++ and other backend languages come next — we build and maintain them as enterprise clients sign up and tell us which language their backend actually runs on. Tell us during onboarding and we'll build, test and maintain a proper client for it as part of your pilot integration. In the meantime the REST API is directly callable from any language over plain HTTP.

• Versioning: not yet. The API is young enough that we're not versioning URLs today — paths are unversioned (POST /match, not /v1/match). When breaking changes are introduced, existing integrations keep working against dated behaviour, and we'll announce the migration path in advance.
• Changelog. Published monthly. Breaking changes announced 30 days in advance to security and engineering contacts.
• Status. Public status page at status.hytribe.xyz with subscribe-by-email.
• Sandbox parity. Sandbox tracks production within 24 hours of any API change.