Use Ask, Ship, and the other plugin skills from your AI coding tool.
If these skills are missing, install the Hamster plugin.
Plugin skills start as /hamster:<skill> in Claude Code, the Antigravity CLI, and Copilot CLI, /<skill> in Cursor, the Antigravity app, and Grok Build, /skill:<skill> in Pi, and a plain request in Codex. The Codex app also lists them in its / menu, as Hamster: Ship and so on.
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, ask in plain words, like "Ask Hamster which workspace decisions apply to this branch."
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.