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Hive introduction

Hive is a co-maintainer for your GitHub project that never sleeps. Point it at a repo and it watches the things that pile up — issues, pull requests, failing CI, CVEs, dependabot alerts — then sends AI coding agents (Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Goose…) to deal with them: triage, fixes, reviews, releases.

You decide how much it is allowed to do. Humans keep every decision that matters; agents do the chores.

A terminal agent is a power tool: you hold it, aim it, and it stops when you stop. Hive is the workshop that runs the power tools for you on three rules:

1. Short-lived agents. Every task starts a fresh agent with a clean context and ends it.
2. External context. What the agent needs to know lives outside the model and is re-injected each time.
3. Prompts driven by deterministic facts. Instructions are templates filled from real data, not hand-tuned prose.

Core concepts

• Hive and spoke: a spoke is the running hive that serves repositories; a hub can register, provision, and observe multiple spokes.
• Agents: configured AI workers with scopes, models, cadences, and permissions for specific lanes of work.
• Governor: the scheduler and policy loop that decides what work is actionable and when agents should be kicked.
• ACMM levels: the AI Codebase Maturity Model — six levels that map how mature a codebase’s tests, reviews and security posture are to what agents may observe, propose, open, review, or merge (paper).
• Hub: the hosted or self-hosted control plane for onboarding hives, heartbeats, fleet views, and hosted-spoke lifecycle.
• Contributors and ClankeR relay: a way for trusted contributors to donate compute and run delegated work through hub-mediated roles.

How it works

1. Connect a repository through the Forge App and configure the project, agents, model backends, and desired ACMM level.
2. The Governor enumerates actionable work and applies deterministic filters before any agent sees a task.
3. Agents receive bounded kicks, work in their configured lanes, and use Hive relays for audited writes such as issues, pull requests, reviews, or merges.
4. Dashboards, logs, fleet health, and hub heartbeats show what happened and what still needs human attention.

Ways to run Hive

• Hosted Hive Hub: start at https://hive.hivecommons.dev and follow the hosted onboarding guide for the no-cluster path.
• Self-hosted: run your own spoke on Kubernetes, Docker Compose, or Podman, or operate a self-hosted hub for a fleet.

Get started

Start with Zero to Automation: Getting Started with Hive. If you want the hosted path, read Hosted Hive Hub onboarding next.

Where to go next

• Architecture
• Getting started
• Operator reference
• Dashboard sections explained — what each dashboard section shows and what to do about it.
• Dashboard settings explained — what each Settings tab controls and where each setting is documented.
• Maintainer commands — slash commands for un-parking issues, requesting help, confirming fixes, reopening issues, and using label or assignment helpers.
• Release channels — what stable, candidate, and edge each mean and what to expect from them.
• Security model
• Data collection and telemetry
• Securing your hive: a first-time operator’s guide
• Community and support
• Documentation map

Current docs target branch v5; use the documentation map for v2 → v4 and v4 → v5 migration pointers.