Public display of a library entry
Public display is the setting of a library entry that shows the entry on the Athenode website, at athenode.com/library, where anyone can read it without an account and search engines can index it. A library entry is an agent setup that a project published to the setup library, the shared catalogue of agent setups that projects have published. An agent setup is a named bundle of what your AI coding tools work with: skills, agents, rules, MCP servers and setup files.
A published entry has two audiences. Every signed-in Athenode user sees every entry in the web app, with its whole content. The open web sees an entry only while its public display is on. Public display covers the entry as a whole: the website shows the entry with its full content, or it doesn't show the entry.
What a public entry shows on the Athenode website
| Part of the entry | Visible to anyone on the web |
|---|---|
| Name, description and tags | In full |
| Counts | How many agents, skills, MCP servers and files the entry holds |
| Each skill | Its name, description, settings and full instructions |
| Bundle files of a skill | The path and full text of every text file. A binary file is listed by its path. |
| Each agent | Its name, description, settings and full instructions |
| Rules | The full text |
| Setup files | The path and full content of every file, including the settings files under settings/ |
| MCP servers | Their names |
Each skill, each agent, the rules and each setup file has a page of its own on the website, and search engines can index every one of those pages.
What public display leaves out
The Athenode website does not show the configuration of an MCP server: its command, arguments, environment variables, URL and headers. It does not show the content of a binary bundle file. It does not show who published the entry, by name or by email address, and it does not show the entry's version number, its version notes or its likes.
Signed-in users see more than the open web. In the web app an entry shows its MCP server configuration, its publisher's name, its version and its likes.
An entry holds a setup and nothing else from the project. Your specifications, ToDo cards, members and code are never part of it, and What Athenode stores describes what Athenode keeps about a project.
Athenode refuses to publish a setup while an MCP server holds a value typed directly into an environment variable or a header. It checks nothing else, so anything written into the rules, a setup file, a skill or an agent becomes public as it is. Read those texts before you publish a setup.
When public display is on
Every publication turns public display on. That holds for the first publication of a setup and for each new version, including a version you publish after turning public display off.
You confirm it once, as part of publishing. In the web app the confirmation is the checkbox on the publish page. In the Athenode CLI it is the flag --confirm-public, and in the Athenode MCP server it is confirmPublic on the library_publish tool. The /atn-manage skill asks you before it publishes and before it turns public display on for an entry that has it off.
The catalogue on the Athenode website is updated within a day of a publication, a new version or an edit of the entry. The catalogue holds up to 50 entries, so an entry with public display on can be absent from it. Treat the content as public from the moment you publish.
How to turn public display off
You turn public display off by editing the entry, which needs the owner or editor role in the project and works on every plan. In the web app, open Edit library entry and clear Also show this entry on the public Athenode website. In the CLI, run athenode library edit with --no-public-display. The entry stays in the setup library for signed-in users, and other projects can go on adding and merging it.
Turning it on again is the same edit with the checkbox selected, or --public-display together with --confirm-public in the CLI. Unpublishing the entry removes it from the library and from the website. The page on publishing a setup has the steps for both.
How long removal from the website takes
After you turn public display off, the entry leaves the Athenode website within a day. Search engines may keep a cached copy for longer. The same holds after you unpublish the entry.
Text that was public may have been read, copied or indexed in the meantime. If something was published by mistake, such as a credential in a command argument, change it at its source as well as removing it from the entry.
When public display is unavailable for an entry
Athenode may make public display unavailable for an entry. The entry then shows "Public display is unavailable for this entry." It stays in the setup library, where signed-in users see it. You can turn its public display off, and you can't turn it on. A new version of such an entry is published to the setup library only, and the publish page says so before you confirm.
An entry also leaves the Athenode website when its publisher's account is deleted. It stays in the setup library.
Example of a public entry
The web shop project publishes its setup "Web shop review". The setup holds the skill checkout-review with the bundle files checklist.md and flow.png, the agent payment-reviewer, a rules text, the file settings/testing.md and the MCP server payments-sandbox, whose configuration is a URL and a header with the value Bearer ${PAYMENTS_TOKEN}.
A visitor without an account can read the entry's name, description and tags, the instructions of checkout-review and of payment-reviewer, the text of checklist.md, the rules and the content of settings/testing.md. The visitor sees that a file flow.png exists and that the setup uses an MCP server called payments-sandbox. The server's URL and header stay out of sight, and so does the name of the person who published the entry.
The standard Athenode setup, which carries Athenode's workflow for spec-driven development (SDD), is a library entry with public display on. Its page in the library catalogue shows what a public entry looks like.