Keep your coding agent in sync with your project context — briefs, tasks, blueprints, and methods update on disk in real time.
When you run hamster sync --watch, the CLI holds a live connection to Hamster Studio and writes every change to your .hamster/ directory as it happens. A teammate updates task requirements in the browser — within seconds, the markdown file on your disk reflects the change. Your coding agent reads that file on its next action and has current context.
This is the core of what the CLI does: it turns your project management context into a local, always-current knowledge base that your coding agent can read directly.
Every synced file is a markdown document with structured YAML frontmatter. A task file includes the task description, acceptance criteria, priority, estimated complexity, and dependency chain. A brief file has the full product requirements. Blueprints contain architecture decisions. Methods capture team conventions.
When your coding agent starts a session in a repo with .hamster/ synced, it can read these files to understand:
No copy-pasting requirements into chat. No switching windows to check a task description. The context is on disk, in the repo, updated live.
After each sync, the CLI generates a skill file at .claude/skills/hamster-project-context/SKILL.md. This file tells your agent where every synced document lives, how to interpret the frontmatter fields, and how to navigate between briefs, tasks, blueprints, and methods. It loads automatically at session start.
The skill file also includes current statistics — how many briefs, tasks, blueprints, and methods are synced, and when the last sync ran — so the agent knows the scope of the project it is working on.
| Entity | Local path | What's in it |
|---|---|---|
| Briefs | .hamster/{account}/briefs/{brief}/brief.md |
Product requirements and context |
| Tasks | .hamster/{account}/briefs/{brief}/tasks/HAM-001-title.md |
Instructions, acceptance criteria, priority, complexity, dependencies |
| Blueprints | .hamster/{account}/blueprints/{name}.md |
Architecture decisions and patterns |
| Methods | .hamster/{account}/methods/{name}.md |
Team conventions and processes |
Done and archived briefs are excluded automatically. Your .hamster/ directory only contains active work.
hamster sync runs once and exits — useful for CI environments or quick refreshes.
hamster sync --watch runs continuously. It does an initial full sync, then listens for changes over a live connection. Individual files update as they change — the CLI does not re-download everything on each edit. If the connection drops, it reconnects and runs a full sync to catch anything missed.
Run hamster sync --force to ignore the local cache and pull everything fresh.
.hamster/{account-slug}/
├── briefs/
│ └── my-project/
│ ├── brief.md
│ └── tasks/
│ ├── HAM-001-set-up-auth.md
│ └── HAM-002-build-dashboard.md
├── blueprints/
│ └── engineering-context.md
├── methods/
│ └── code-review-process.md
└── .state.json
.claude/skills/hamster-project-context/
└── SKILL.md
Add .hamster/ to your .gitignore. The content is generated and specific to your account.
hamster status to see sync statistics — what was synced last, how many entities are on disk, and whether anything is stale.