All Hands CLI

Internal CLI for the All Hands agentic harness.

Installation

cd .allhands/harness
npm install

The ah command is automatically installed to ~/.local/bin/ah when you run npx all-hands init. This shim finds and executes the project-local .allhands/harness/ah from any subdirectory.

For local development, copy the shim to your PATH:

cp .allhands/harness/ah ~/.local/bin/ah

Universal Ctags (for ah docs command)

# macOS
brew install universal-ctags

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install universal-ctags

AST-grep (for advanced code search)

# macOS
brew install ast-grep

# cargo
cargo install ast-grep --locked

Desktop Notifications (macOS)

brew install --cask notifier

Language Servers (for LSP tool)

npm install -g typescript-language-server typescript pyright
brew install swift  

Environment Variables

Check .env.ai.example for what you should populate .env.ai with.

Quick Start

ah <command>

The ah command works from any directory within an all-hands project.

Syncing to Target Repos

The sync command distributes harness files from this repo to target repositories:

ah sync /path/to/target-repo

By default, sync preserves configuration files that target repos customize (settings, hooks, validation suites). These "init-only" files are only included during first-time setup or when explicitly requested.

The --init Flag

Use --init to include init-only files — configuration defaults like docs.json that are normally withheld to avoid overwriting target-repo customizations:

# First-time setup — include all defaults
ah sync /path/to/target-repo --init

# Regular update — preserves target-repo configuration
ah sync /path/to/target-repo

Use --init when setting up a new repo or resetting configuration to harness defaults. Omit it for routine updates. See ah sync --help for full options.

Project Settings

Project-specific configuration lives in .allhands/settings.json:

{
  "$schema": "./harness/src/schemas/settings.schema.json",
}