Run Your Community From a Conversation
What changed: Nimbio now ships an official MCP server, so you can connect Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or any Model Context Protocol client straight to your community and work in plain language instead of code. Ask who opened the north gate after midnight last week, give a new tenant a key starting Monday, or kill a contractor’s guest link — and get it done in the same sentence you would use with a colleague.
Where to find it: npx -y @nimbio/mcp-server with your API key, added to your assistant’s MCP configuration. Nothing to clone, nothing to build.
What you’ll see: 54 tools covering gates, members and keys, guest access, the access and audit logs, community settings, hardware and webhooks — the same surface the REST API offers, grouped the way a community manager thinks rather than the way the endpoints are organised. Your assistant picks the right one; you never name it.
What you need to do: Create an API key in the community portal and start with a test key (nimbio_test_*). Test keys run the full pipeline — authentication, rate limiting, permissions, validation — and then simulate, so nothing opens and nobody is messaged. Explore freely, then switch when you are ready.
Who this affects: Community Managers, Customers, and developers building on Nimbio
It Reads By Default, and Asks Before It Acts
What changed: The server ships locked down. Out of the box it can read your whole community and change nothing. Turning on write access is a deliberate step, and turning it on for a live key is a second deliberate step on top of that — a live key registers no write tools at all until you explicitly allow it. The worst outcome of a hurried install is an assistant that can only look.
Where to find it: NIMBIO_MCP_MODE (read-only, write, unrestricted) and NIMBIO_MCP_ALLOW_LIVE in your MCP configuration
What you’ll see: Anything with a consequence you cannot take back — opening a gate, holding one open indefinitely, revoking a guest link, removing a home, replaying webhook deliveries, switching access-code mode, messaging every member — stops and asks a person first. You are shown exactly what is about to happen, including which gate and which community, before anything fires. The assistant cannot answer that question on your behalf: there is no flag it can set to skip the prompt.
What you’ll also see: Every answer is labelled TEST MODE or LIVE and names the system it is talking to, so a scroll-back never leaves you guessing whether a real gate was involved.
What you need to do: No action needed — these are the defaults. Change them when your use case calls for it.
Who this affects: Community Managers, Customers, Nimbio Admins
Guest Links Stay Secret, and Mistakes Are Explained
What changed: A guest link opens your gate for anyone holding it — no account, no key, no login. So the server never prints one into a conversation unless you ask for it in as many words, and the option that reveals it says exactly what it does. And the handful of results that are genuinely easy to misread are now explained rather than passed through raw: a gate that does not confirm in time tells you it may have opened anyway and that retrying will not re-fire it; a scan-only gate says so; a permission error names the exact permission your key is missing and tells you a retry will not help.
Where to find it: Throughout — in guest-link results, and in any error the assistant reports back
What you’ll see: Redacted tokens by default, with a one-line explanation of why. Errors that tell you what to do next instead of a status code.
What you need to do: No action needed.
Who this affects: Community Managers, Customers, Guests
Single-Entry Access Codes
What changed: Communities running the single-entry access-code system are now fully supported. Your assistant can report which of the two systems you use, preview exactly what switching would cost — how many codes would be deleted and how many residents affected — and make the switch behind a confirmation that shows you that preview first.
Where to find it: Ask your assistant about access codes, or to switch entry modes
What you’ll see: The mode in force, and before any switch, a plain statement of the blast radius. Switching deletes every access code in the community, in both directions, because a code’s meaning changes with the mode — so that number is shown to a person before anything happens.
What you need to do: Nothing, unless you want to change systems. If you do, read the preview.
Who this affects: Community Managers, Customers