papagai Documentation
papagai is a command-line tool that runs Claude AI on git repositories
using isolated worktrees. It allows Claude to make changes without interfering
with the main working directory.
Note
papagai requires that the claude command is installed and set up.
The main goal of papagai is to make it trivial to invoke Claude for local
review and development. When Claude has finished, papagai merges the work back
into a papagai/<branch>-<date>-<time>-<uuid> branch and updates the
papagai/latest branch to point at that branch.
Code review or development is thus a cycle of running papagai and cherry-picking
or merging from the papagai/latest branch.
Quick Start
Installation
$ pip install papagai
Or directly install from git
$ pip install git+https://github.com/whot/papagai
Code review with papagai
$ git switch mybranch
$ papagai review
Working in papagai/review/mybranch-2025-11-12-7be3946e (based off main) or papagai/latest
[...]
My work here is done. Check out branch papagai/review/mybranch-2025-11-12-7be3946e or papagai/latest
The review command includes programming best practices guidance, and instructs
the agent to put all the review comments on the branch.
Development with papagai
The primary commands are code and do to get Claude to perform tasks:
$ papagai code
Please tell me what you want me to do (Ctrl+D to complete)
Update all .format() strings with f-strings
Working in papagai/main-2025-11-12-7be3946e (based off main)
[...]
My work here is done. Check out branch papagai/main-2025-11-12-7be3946e
or, for more complex instructions, use a prewritten file:
$ papagai code instructions.md
Working in papagai/main-2025-11-12-7be3946e (based off main)
[...]
My work here is done. Check out branch papagai/main-2025-11-12-7be3946e or papagai/latest
The code command includes programming best practices guidance, while do runs without the programming primer.