Sign up at tryhamster.com and you land in a pinned Getting started chat, where Hamster sets up your workspace with you one step at a time. Then start with the outcome you want and let Hamster shape the work beneath it.
Confirm your email and you go straight into a chat called Getting started, pinned at the top of your sidebar.
Hamster has already made your team and named it after your work email's domain, so jo@acme-corp.com gets a team called Acme Corp. A personal address such as Gmail or Outlook gets "your name's Team".
Hamster speaks first with a short welcome, then shows one setup card, Make Hamster yours. It asks only what applies to you:
Pick a role and click Continue. The card folds into a one-line summary under You're set up.
If you gave a company website, Hamster starts building your first Blueprints from it straight away. If you didn't, it asks once for a website or strategy document. A strategy doc can't go on the card, so drop it into the chat. A Building your Blueprints card counts the Blueprints as they're written, and any link or file you share later joins the same build. Hamster keeps talking with you while the build runs, and reports once when it's done.
After setup, Hamster opens with a note for the roles you picked, then offers one next step at a time, in this order:
A card for another tool, such as Connect Linear, appears only when the conversation turns to that tool's work. When you name a teammate who should see the work and you can invite people, Hamster shows an invite card. If the company you mention isn't your workspace's name and you can manage the workspace, Hamster offers once to rename it. Dismiss a code or invite card and Hamster doesn't offer that step again.
If you go quiet with steps left, Hamster checks in up to three times, after about 3, 6, and 12 minutes. The check-ins stop once you reply or act on a card.
Hamster takes you into Getting started the first time you open the workspace. After that, the workspace home opens on a new thread, and the Getting started pin takes you back. Setup never blocks the rest of Hamster: every other page works while you're part way through.
If you've never finished setup and have no Getting started chat, the home shows Let's set up your workspace with a Get started button that opens one.
If you're new to Hamster, accepting an invitation lands you in your own Getting started chat. Its card asks for your role, and for your name and a password if they're missing. Hamster then sums up the Goals, Initiatives, and Briefs your team is working on, by name, and offers to help you pick up a first piece of work. See Joining a team.
If you already finished setup in another workspace, or used this one before the Getting started chat existed, and something is still left to set up, such as your first Initiative or Brief, a Getting started chat is pinned in your sidebar with that one step on offer.
In a new workspace, Getting started offers to draft your first Initiative or Brief from your Blueprints once they're in.
You can also start from the outcome you want. Click New thread in the sidebar and describe it as casually as you like. For example:
“I want to build a login app for my lodge.”
Hamster shapes the Initiative that moves that Goal and drafts the first Brief beneath it. When your workspace has no Goals yet, Hamster may first help you define the Goal, asking for the outcome or Metric that defines success and a framework.
In workspaces that support Goal creation from chat, Hamster saves the Goal. Otherwise, it carries the Goal in the conversation and continues into the Initiative and Brief without blocking.
Across this flow, Hamster is the harness. It automatically applies the relevant Methods, including any your workspace has turned on, while it shapes and delivers the work.
Hamster is most useful when it can read the work your team has already accumulated, so the next thing worth doing is connecting the tools you already use.
Most teams find GitHub and Slack are the two highest-leverage Connections to start with — GitHub because it's the largest single source of code-level context, Slack because it's where most of your team's running conversation already lives. From there, add Linear or Jira, Figma, Notion, and Google Drive as the need comes up.
Each Connection widens what the AI can read when it works on a Brief, generates a Plan, or proposes an initiative. Two Connections is plenty to begin with; the rest tend to grow in naturally as you use Hamster more.
A Blueprint is the English description of something stable in your business — a product, a system, a team. If you set up a new workspace and share a website or strategy document, Getting started builds your first ones. To add another, chat with Hamster about what you'd like a Blueprint for:
"Build me a Blueprint for our checkout product. The repo is
acme/checkout. It's used by first-time buyers."
Hamster reads what's already in your Context Graph, drafts a Blueprint, and hands you back something concrete to react to and edit. You can repeat this for the systems and surfaces that matter most — three or four Blueprints covering your highest-traffic products is usually plenty to ground every Brief that follows.
The fastest way to feel what Hamster actually does is to run an idea you've been kicking around through the whole loop, end-to-end.
A first delivery usually looks like this:
Doing this once on your own first lets you feel the loop — Goal, Initiative, Brief, Plan, delivered — before you bring anyone else into it.
Once the loop feels familiar, run it again with other people in the room. Invite teammates — Reviewer seats are free and unlimited, which makes them the right default for stakeholders who only need to read Briefs and vote on alignment.
The flow looks the same as solo: align on the Goal, share the Initiative and Brief, gather feedback, collect alignment votes, and deliver once everyone has signed off. The Blueprints and Briefs you've already built carry full context, so teammates joining a discussion can pick it up without needing a half-hour catch-up first.
The Hamster plugin lets Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity, Copilot CLI, Grok Build, or Pi pull a Brief, its Plan, the relevant Blueprints, and the connected context straight into your session. Any other tool that speaks MCP can connect the MCP Server directly. Run Ship, and your AI coding tool works through the Plan's Tasks in your repository, then asks before it opens a pull request.
For hands-off delivery, Cloud Agents run the same Brief in the cloud.
On the home welcome screen, Hamster shows personalized next-step suggestions based on your workspace state, team size, and recent activity. These dynamic nudges refresh as you work:
Only a persisted, personalized suggestion is shown. On a cold start Hamster shows a loading state while the suggestion is generated; if no suggestion is available, the space remains empty instead of substituting canned persona prompts.
Click a suggestion to start a pre-filled chat or navigate to the relevant feature. Dismissed suggestions reappear based on workspace state, so they adapt as you ship.
After the first-run loop, use the navigation strip to return to Goals, Initiatives, Briefs, Methods (which also holds your Routines), Blueprints, and Connections without interrupting your work.
To see what's shipped recently, open Help at the bottom of the navigation strip and choose What's New, or tap the gift icon in the top bar on a narrow screen. An orange dot on either one means a release has shipped since you last looked. Read more opens the full entry in the Studio changelog.