Marvin CLI

AI-powered product development assistant. Marvin provides three expert personas — Product Owner, Delivery Manager, and Technical Lead — that help teams manage features, epics, tasks, sprints, decisions, actions, questions, meetings, and reports through an interactive CLI backed by Claude.

Quick Start

# Install globally
npm install -g mrvn-cli

# Set your Anthropic API key
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...

# Initialize a project
marvin init

# Start a chat session
marvin chat --as po     # Product Owner
marvin chat --as dm     # Delivery Manager
marvin chat --as tl     # Technical Lead

How It Works

Marvin stores project governance data as Markdown files with YAML frontmatter inside a .marvin/ directory — human-readable, Git-friendly, and Obsidian-compatible. Each artifact gets an auto-incrementing ID (F-001, E-001, SP-001, D-001, etc.).

When you start a chat session, Marvin loads a persona-specific system prompt, exposes your project data as MCP tools that Claude can call, and starts an interactive conversation where the agent reads, creates, and updates artifacts on your behalf.

.marvin/
├── config.yaml              # Project configuration
├── sessions.yaml            # Saved chat sessions
├── skills/                  # Custom skills
├── sources/                 # Source documents for ingestion
└── docs/
    ├── features/            # F-001.md, F-002.md, ...
    ├── epics/               # E-001.md, E-002.md, ...
    ├── tasks/               # T-001.md, T-002.md, ...
    ├── sprints/             # SP-001.md, SP-002.md, ...
    ├── decisions/           # D-001.md, D-002.md, ...
    ├── actions/             # A-001.md, A-002.md, ...
    ├── questions/           # Q-001.md, Q-002.md, ...
    ├── meetings/            # M-001.md, M-002.md, ...
    └── ...

Personas

| Short | Full Name | Focus | |-------|-----------|-------| | po | Product Owner | Product vision, feature prioritization, stakeholder needs, acceptance criteria | | dm | Delivery Manager | Sprint planning, epic scheduling, risk management, governance, meeting facilitation | | tl | Technical Lead | Architecture, epic/task scoping, code quality, technical decisions |

Each persona has a tuned system prompt and access to governance tools for managing artifacts — plus methodology-specific tools when a plugin is active.

Key Features

Structured workflow — Product Owner defines features, Tech Lead breaks them into epics and tasks, Delivery Manager plans sprints and tracks progress. Hard validation enforces that epics link to approved features.

Two methodologies — Generic Agile (default) for standard agile, and SAP Application Extension Methodology for SAP BTP projects with use cases, tech assessments, and extension designs.

Skills — Composable capabilities that extend any persona: Jira integration (bidirectional sync), PRD generation (for Claude TaskMaster or Claude Code), and governance review. Create custom skills with the SKILL.md format.

Source ingestion — Drop PDFs, markdown, or text files into .marvin/sources/ and run marvin ingest --all to extract governance artifacts using AI analysis.

Web dashboard — marvin web launches a local dashboard with persona-specific views, sprint boards, GAR reports, and artifact detail pages.

MCP server — marvin serve starts a standalone MCP server for Claude Desktop or Claude Code, giving Claude direct access to all governance tools.

Git sync — Version and share governance data independently from your codebase with marvin sync.

Reports — GAR (Green/Amber/Red) status reports, health checks, and AI-powered sprint summaries.

Documentation

Full documentation is in the docs/ directory:

For users:

• Getting Started — install, initialize, first session
• Personas — what each persona does and when to use it
• CLI Reference — complete command reference
• Configuration — user and project config options
• Document Types — all artifact types and their fields
• Skills — using and creating skills
• Jira Integration — bidirectional Jira sync
• Web Dashboard — local web UI
• MCP Server — use with Claude Desktop/Code

For contributors:

• Architecture Overview — codebase structure and design
• Plugin Development — building methodology plugins
• Skill Development — creating skills with SKILL.md
• Testing — test conventions and patterns

Development

npm run build        # Build with tsup
npm run dev          # Run via tsx (no build needed)
npm test             # Run tests with Vitest
npm run typecheck    # Type check
npm run lint         # ESLint
npm run format       # Prettier check

Tech Stack

TypeScript (ESM, Node 20+), Claude Agent SDK, Commander.js, Markdown + YAML frontmatter storage, Vitest, tsup.

License

MIT License with Commons Clause. You can use, modify, and distribute Marvin freely — the Commons Clause restricts selling Marvin itself as a service or product.