Pull your Hamster Briefs, Tasks, and skills into the same repo your AI coding agents work in — and run Delivery commands without leaving the terminal.
The Hamster CLI is a single Go binary that turns your Hamster workspace into local markdown your AI coding agents can read directly. Brief and Task content land in .hamster/, your shared agent skills land in .agents/skills/, and the same paths are visible to Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, Continue, and Windsurf — so every agent reads the same source of truth.
The CLI is a sync engine, not an editor. Editing Briefs, Tasks, and skills happens in Hamster (or, for skills, optionally in your repo with bidirectional sync). The CLI's job is to make that content show up beside your code.
/ship from inside Claude Code and other agent surfaces| Command | What it does |
|---|---|
hamster auth login |
Browser sign-in; stores your session in your OS keychain |
hamster init |
Create .hamster/ and pick which team this repo syncs with |
hamster sync [identifier] |
Pull Briefs, Tasks, Blueprints, and Methods for the active team. Accepts a Brief slug, UUID, or full Studio URL |
hamster sync --watch |
Continuous live sync — local files update as Briefs change |
hamster team list / team switch |
List or switch the active team account |
hamster brief create |
Create a Brief from the terminal |
hamster task status <id> <status> |
Move a Task to a new status |
hamster skills sync |
Bidirectional skill sync — pull updates and push local edits |
hamster skills agents |
Pick which AI agents (Claude Code, Continue, Windsurf, …) get symlinks to .agents/skills/ |
Run hamster --help for the full command tree.
The CLI keeps your shared agent skills in sync between your repo and your workspace. hamster skills sync runs in both directions by default:
[K]eep local / [U]se remote / [S]kip prompt before anything is overwritten.If your IDE or agent expects skills under its own path (.claude/skills, .continue/skills, .windsurf/skills, etc.) instead of the universal .agents/skills/, run hamster skills agents to pick which directories should symlink to the canonical location. Hamster maintains symlinks safely — it never deletes the canonical data even if an agent directory was previously a symlink.
hamster skills sync --pull-only and --push-only flags are available when you want to scope the sync to one direction.
The CLI registers Hamster slash commands inside agent surfaces that support them. The most common one is /ship, which kicks off background Delivery for a brief. Slash commands are not authored in your repo — they are generated from the skills the CLI syncs, so the available commands stay current automatically.
See Slash Commands for the full list and where each one runs.
The same binary works in three contexts:
HAMSTER_ACCOUNT_ID and authenticate with an access token environment variable to skip every prompt.Auth credentials live in your OS keychain by default (macOS Keychain, Windows Credential Manager, or the Linux Secret Service). On WSL or headless setups without a keychain, the CLI falls back to an encrypted file using a passphrase you set in HAMSTER_AUTH_PASSPHRASE.
tryhamster.com/... URL straight into hamster sync — the CLI parses all three and only syncs that brief..hamster/ and .claude/skills/hamster-project-context/ to your .gitignore. They are generated and account-specific.hamster sync --watch in a side terminal during a session — your AI agent always sees the latest Brief and Task state without you needing to remember to re-sync.hamster team switch when you move between client workspaces. The CLI cleans the previous team's directory before re-syncing the new one.