@quirna/mcp

Ask a human before your agent acts. Official Quirna server for the Model Context Protocol.

Add one block of config and your agent gains a tool it can call before doing something consequential — a refund, a production deploy, a destructive migration. A named human approves it on their phone. The agent proceeds only if they said yes, and the decision is signed and kept.

Nothing moves until someone says yes.

Your agent's framework may already have a way to pause for confirmation. This is different in three ways that matter once it is not just you at the terminal:

• The decision leaves the loop. It goes to whoever your policy nominates, on their phone, behind Face ID — not to whoever happens to be watching the agent run.

• Who approves is policy, not prompt. Quorum, risk tier and which group is asked live in your organization's settings. The agent cannot choose its own approvers, and neither can a prompt injection.

• It leaves evidence. Every decision is signed at the moment it is made, and exports to a file a third party can verify without trusting us.

Install

Nothing to install: the config below runs it on demand with npx. To pin it, npm install -g @quirna/mcp and use quirna-mcp as the command.

Related MCP server: @looppause/mcp

Before you start

The mobile app is in private beta. Decisions are made on the phone and nowhere else — the Console configures policies and never decides one — so without the app an approval request is created and then waits until it expires. Write to hello@quirna.com and we will get you in. Everything else below works today.

Then, in the Console:

1. A System key. Open Users → Systems and register one for this agent. You get a key (ck_…), shown once.

2. A Policy, which decides who approves a given kind of request and how many of them are needed.

3. The app, on the phone of whoever will approve.

Configure your agent

Claude Code — claude mcp add quirna --env QUIRNA_API_KEY=ck_… -- npx -y @quirna/mcp

Cursor (~/.cursor/mcp.json), Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json) and most other clients take the same shape:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "quirna": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@quirna/mcp"],
      "env": {
        "QUIRNA_API_KEY": "ck_your_system_key",
        "QUIRNA_REQUESTER_NAME": "Ops Agent",
        "QUIRNA_ENVIRONMENT": "production"
      }
    }
  }
}

Environment

On the key. It lives in your agent client's config file, which is often in a dotfile and sometimes in a repo. Treat it as a deployment credential: give each agent its own System rather than sharing one, scope it in the Console to the kinds it may request, and rotate it there if the file gets somewhere it should not be. A System key can only ask — it can never approve anything.

The tools

request_approval

Creates the request and waits for a human.

Notably absent: who approves, how many are needed, how long it stays open. Those are the organization's to decide in the Console, once, for every caller — an agent that could pick its own approvers would not be a control.

check_approval

Takes an approval_id and waits for that existing request. Use it when request_approval came back still pending; calling request_approval again would put the same action in front of a second human.

What the agent gets back

Anything that is not APPROVED opens with NOT AUTHORIZED, followed by why, and by an explicit instruction not to perform the action. The structured result carries authorized: true | false for code that parses instead of reading.

Asking and getting an answer is a successful tool call, whatever the answer was — a denial is the product working, not a failure. isError is reserved for the cases where the tool could not run at all and nothing was learned: Quirna unreachable, a key rejected, the call aborted. So an agent can tell "a human said no" from "the approval system is down", which are opposite situations, and nothing invites it to retry a denial into a second person's hands.

When nobody answers

An agent running unattended at 3am will hit this: the request expires and the action is never authorized. That is the correct outcome, not a bug to design around. If your agent needs to run without anyone awake, the answer is a policy whose condition does not require a human for that case — not a longer timeout.

Two timeouts are in play, and they are not the same:

• QUIRNA_WAIT_MS (default 90s) is how long a tool call waits before returning the approval id so the agent can resume. It exists because agent clients kill long tool calls. The request stays live.

• The policy's expiry (set in the Console) is how long the request stays open. Only this one can time a request out.

Links

• quirna.com — what it is

• console.quirna.com — policies, groups, systems

• @quirna/sdk — for calling Quirna from your own code instead

MIT © Quirna