SwissArmyHammer
SwissArmyHammer is an integrated software development lifecycle (SDLC) platform for AI-powered coding agents. It combines skills, agents, tools, and validators into a single system that turns your AI coding assistant into a complete development team.
Instead of a loose collection of scripts and prompts, SwissArmyHammer provides a structured composition of capabilities — each with a clear role — that work together to plan, implement, test, review, and ship code.
Three CLIs, One System
SwissArmyHammer ships as three complementary command-line tools:
| CLI | Role |
|---|---|
sah | The core engine. MCP server, skills, tools, agents, and workflows. |
avp | The validator. Hook-based code quality enforcement that runs alongside your agent. |
mirdan | The package manager. Install, publish, and share skills, validators, tools, and plugins across agents and teams. |
Each tool is independently useful, but they’re designed to work together. sah provides the capabilities, avp enforces the guardrails, and mirdan lets you share and reuse everything.
How It Works
At its core, SwissArmyHammer extends AI coding agents (like Claude Code) with a composable set of SDLC primitives:
- Skills define what to do — plan, implement, test, review, commit. Each skill is a self-contained workflow that the agent can invoke.
- Agents (subagent modes) define how to think — a planner reasons differently than a tester. Agent modes shape the AI’s behavior for specific roles.
- Tools provide what to work with — file operations, shell execution, code intelligence, kanban boards, git integration. These are the hands of the system.
- Validators enforce what’s acceptable — code quality rules, security checks, test integrity. These run as hooks, catching problems before they land.
The agent orchestrates these pieces through a natural conversation interface. Say /plan and the system researches your codebase, decomposes work into kanban cards, and presents a plan. Say /implement and it picks up the next card, writes code, runs tests, and reports back. Say /review and a dedicated reviewer agent examines the changes with language-specific guidelines.
The SDLC Loop
A typical development cycle with SwissArmyHammer looks like:
/plan → /implement → /test → /review → /commit
↑ |
└────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Each step is a skill backed by specialized agent modes and tools. The kanban board tracks progress across steps. Validators run continuously in the background, enforcing quality at every stage.
This isn’t a rigid pipeline — you can use any skill independently, skip steps, or run them in any order. The system is designed to support how developers actually work, not to impose a process.
What Makes It Different
- Composition over configuration. Skills, agents, tools, and validators are separate, pluggable units. Mix and match what you need.
- Agent-native. Built from the ground up as an MCP server for AI coding agents, not retrofitted from human-oriented tooling.
- Quality built in. Validators run as hooks on every tool call — code quality, security, and test integrity are enforced automatically, not as an afterthought.
- Shareable. Mirdan provides a package registry so teams can publish and install skills, validators, tools, and plugins. Your team’s best practices become installable packages.
- Language-aware. Review guidelines, coverage analysis, and code intelligence adapt to the language you’re working in — Rust, TypeScript, Python, Go, and more.