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hatch3r

Crack the egg. Hatch better agents.

hatch3r is an open-source CLI and Cursor plugin that installs a tool-agnostic agentic coding setup into any repository — 29 agents, 53 skills, 65 rules, 30 commands, and 7 hooks generated from one canonical source. One command gives you agents, skills, rules, commands, and MCP integrations -- optimized for your coding tool of choice.

What is hatch3r?​

hatch3r maintains a single canonical source of agent configuration (bundled inside the npm package) and generates native configuration for 3 AI coding platforms (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot). You define your agent setup once and hatch3r adapts it to whatever supported tool you use.

<your repo>/
  .hatch3r/                       <- Sole hatch3r footprint in your repo
    ├── hatch.json                # Manifest (schemaVersion 3)
    ├── overrides/                # User-authored canonical overrides (escape hatch)
    ├── learnings/                # /learn captures
    ├── handoffs/                 # Cross-session handoff bundles
    └── mcp/mcp.json              # Resolved MCP server config

  .cursor/                        <- Generated (Cursor adapter)
  .claude/                        <- Generated (Claude Code adapter)
  CLAUDE.md                       <- Generated (Claude Code bridge)
  .github/copilot-instructions.md <- Generated (Copilot adapter, plus .github/instructions, .github/prompts, .github/agents)
  .worktreeinclude                <- Generated (worktree isolation)

Canonical content (agents, skills, rules, commands, hooks) lives inside the bundled npm package — adapters read from there directly, so end-user repos no longer contain a .agents/ mirror. (Removed in 1.9.0; see CHANGELOG.)

Key Features​

  • One command setup -- npx hatch3r init detects your repo, asks about your project context, lets you choose a content profile, and generates everything
  • Selective init -- choose what you need: Minimal (core only), Standard (recommended), Full, or Custom content profiles with greenfield/brownfield and solo/team filtering
  • Tool-agnostic -- single source of truth with adapters for 3 platforms (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot)
  • Two-axis pillar framework (2.0.0) -- 8 governance pillars (P1-P8) plus 9 content-quality pillars (CQ1-CQ9), each owned by a specialist agent with measurable thresholds. See Quality-Vector Specialists.
  • Board management -- full GitHub Projects V2 lifecycle from todo.md to merged PRs
  • Sub-agentic delegation -- implementer agents, dependency-aware orchestration, collision detection
  • Safe merge system -- managed blocks preserve your customizations across syncs
  • Multi-repo workspaces -- manage multiple git repos from a shared workspace root with content inheritance and per-repo overrides
  • Extensible -- per-agent model selection, .customize.yaml overrides, composable recipes, event-driven hooks

Requirements​

  • Node.js 22+ (check with node --version)
  • A git repository (for board features, a GitHub remote)

Next Steps​

  • Core Concepts -- the six load-bearing terms, in one screen, before you install
  • Quick Start -- install hatch3r in under a minute
  • What You Get -- explore the agents, skills, rules, and commands included
  • Supported Tools -- see which coding tools are supported