Ask Hamster about your workspace and ship a Brief from Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity, Copilot CLI, Grok Build, or Pi. One plugin adds the Ask and Ship skills, backed by Hamster's hosted MCP Server.
The Hamster plugin adds the Ask and Ship skills to your AI coding tool and connects it to Hamster's hosted MCP Server at https://tryhamster.com/mcp, which is how Ask reaches your workspace. Its setup skill installs the hamster CLI if it's missing, and the CLI keeps your team's Briefs, Plans, Blueprints, and Methods synced as markdown in the repository's .hamster/ folder. Ship works from that synced context.
setup, plan-hamster, resume-hamster, review-hamster, qa, and retro from your AI coding toolYou need a Hamster account. To ship, you also need git and the GitHub CLI (gh).
Install the plugin in each AI coding tool you use. Copy the prompt to hand the install to your tool, or pick your tool and run the commands yourself.
Install Hamster in this repository. Fetch and follow https://tryhamster.com/plugin/install
Or install it yourself:
/plugin marketplace add gethamster/plugin /plugin install hamster@hamster-plugins
Run /reload-plugins (or restart), then /hamster:setup. Finish the hosted MCP Server sign-in from /mcp.
https://github.com/gethamster/plugin
Run /setup, then follow Cursor's Hamster sign-in prompt.
On Cursor Enterprise, an admin must allow marketplace imports first. This install also covers Grok Bot, which shares Cursor's plugin library, so skip /add-plugin there. If Grok Bot shows "Complete GitHub auth to sync installed plugins", complete GitHub auth when Grok Bot asks.
codex plugin marketplace add gethamster/plugin codex plugin add hamster@hamster-plugins
Say "Install Hamster" to run setup. Codex asks for the hosted MCP Server sign-in when you install the plugin.
After the first command adds the marketplace, you can also pick hamster@hamster-plugins from /plugins. Hamster's Codex Plugins Directory listing is a skills-only build without the hosted MCP Server, so Ask falls back to hamster chat; use the commands above to get the MCP Server.
agy plugin install https://github.com/gethamster/plugin
Say "Install Hamster" to run setup. To sign in to the hosted MCP Server in the CLI, open /mcp, select hamster_hamster, then Authenticate. In the app (2.15 or newer), open Settings → Customizations → Installed MCP Servers, select Authenticate on hamster_hamster, approve Hamster, and paste the code. The plugin registers hamster_hamster itself, so a manual hamster entry in mcp_config.json would add a second copy of every tool.
Updating an existing install? Uninstall first so renamed skills from an older version don't linger:
agy plugin uninstall hamster agy plugin install https://github.com/gethamster/plugin
copilot plugin marketplace add gethamster/plugin copilot plugin install hamster@hamster-plugins
Run /hamster:setup. To sign in to the hosted MCP Server, run /mcp auth hamster.
Copilot CLI lists the skills as /hamster:<skill>.
grok plugin install gethamster/plugin --trust
Run /setup. To sign in to the hosted MCP Server, open /mcps, select hamster, and press i.
pi install git:github.com/gethamster/plugin
Run /skill:setup to install the CLI and sign in, or run curl -fsSL https://tryhamster.com/cli/install | bash, then hamster auth login and hamster init.
Pi has no MCP support, so Hamster runs through the CLI.
The prompt finishes setup for you. If you ran the commands yourself, start setup from the repository you want to connect and finish the hosted MCP Server sign-in, as your tool's tab shows.
Expect two sign-ins with the same Hamster account: one in your tool for the hosted MCP Server, and one when setup runs hamster auth login for the CLI. Run hamster status to confirm the CLI is signed in and synced. To change teams later, see CLI Sync.
Each is a plugin skill, and each runs only when you ask for it:
setup installs the CLI if it's missing, signs it in with hamster auth login, connects this repository to your team with hamster init (which may ask you to pick a team), and runs the first sync. ship, plan-hamster, and resume-hamster send you to setup if it hasn't run. Run it yourself before review-hamster, qa, or retro.ask-hamster sends your request to Hamster along with local context like the branch, diff, or error you're looking at, for example /hamster:ask-hamster Which decisions apply to this branch? in Claude Code.ship works through the Tasks of a Brief's Plan, grouping Tasks that don't overlap into waves that run in parallel. It asks what to do with uncommitted changes before it starts, and again before any push or pull request.Plugin Skills covers how to start each skill in your tool, what Ship accepts, and how Ask reaches Hamster when the hosted MCP Server isn't available.
ask_hamster, but not the plugin skills or the synced .hamster/ files.curl -fsSL https://tryhamster.com/cli/install | bash, then run hamster auth login (or set HAMSTER_ACCESS_TOKEN in CI) and hamster init in the repository. You get sync, hamster chat, and the other CLI commands, but not the Ask or Ship skills. CLI Authentication has the full steps.