Use Ask, Ship, and the other plugin skills from your AI coding tool.
If these skills are missing, install the Hamster plugin.
Each tool starts a plugin skill its own way:
| Tool | Start a skill |
|---|---|
| Claude Code, the Antigravity CLI, Copilot CLI | /hamster:<skill> |
| Cursor, the Antigravity app, Grok Build | /<skill> |
| Codex | $hamster:<skill>. The Codex app also lists them in its / menu, as Hamster: Ship and so on. |
| Pi | /skill:<skill> |
Ask answers questions about your workspace, such as priorities, blockers, Blueprints, and related work, in the context of the code you're working on.
In Cursor:
/ask-hamster I'm changing auth middleware on this branch. Which workspace decisions apply?
In Claude Code:
/hamster:ask-hamster I'm changing auth middleware on this branch. Which workspace decisions apply?
In Codex:
$hamster:ask-hamster I'm changing auth middleware on this branch. Which workspace decisions apply?
Ask sends your request, plus the local context Hamster can't see on its own, to the ask_hamster tool on the hosted MCP Server. If those tools are unavailable and the CLI is installed and signed in, Ask uses hamster chat instead, and a follow-up question continues the same conversation.
Ship runs inside your AI coding tool's session and executes the existing Plan and Tasks from synced .hamster/ context. It also reads the local project-context skill, Blueprints, and Methods generated by hamster sync, and can update status through the CLI as work progresses.
It accepts a Brief slug, UUID, or full Hamster URL. In Cursor:
/ship improve-cli-docs
/ship 2de8d546-50ab-4dbd-a678-579ec8119f60
/ship https://tryhamster.com/home/hamster/briefs/2de8d546-50ab-4dbd-a678-579ec8119f60
With no argument, /ship lists your synced Briefs that are ready to work on (aligned, refining, or delivering, with Tasks) so you can pick one. Claude Code uses /hamster:ship with the same optional input.
Ship can create local branches and commits, but it asks for your explicit consent before every remote push or pull-request operation.
Ship works in waves: groups of parent Tasks that don't overlap, run in parallel. A task-executor worker builds each parent Task and its subtasks, and each parent Task gets its own commits. A wave-reviewer worker then reviews the wave's combined changes; small, low-risk waves are reviewed inline. In Claude Code these workers are plugin agents; in other tools, Ship runs the same steps in a subagent or inline.
The Hamster plugin has six more skills. Start them the same way as Ask and Ship.
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
setup | Installs the Hamster CLI if it's missing, signs it in, connects this repository to your team, and runs the first sync. Run it for first-run setup, or when ship, plan-hamster, or resume-hamster report SETUP_NEEDED (the CLI is missing, signed out, or can't sync) |
plan-hamster | Read-only analysis of a Brief: it builds the dependency tree and wave schedule from the synced Plan, with optional CEO or engineering review modes, and changes no code |
resume-hamster | Continues an interrupted Ship session. It reconstructs progress from Task statuses and git history, then restarts at the correct wave |
review-hamster | Two-pass code review of the current feature branch: critical issues that block shipping first, then advisory findings |
qa | Systematic QA over your changes, with diff-aware, full-suite, quick-smoke, or regression modes and an optional fix loop |
retro | Engineering retrospective from git history over a time window: team metrics, contributor detail, trends, and suggested actions |
review-hamster, qa, and retro need the synced .hamster/ folder, so run setup in the repository first.
ask-hamster, plan-hamster, resume-hamster, and review-hamster carry a -hamster suffix because Cursor lists plugin skills as bare commands: ask, plan, and resume would collide with names Cursor already uses, and review follows the same convention.