Shinobi

The task spine for AI coding agents. Shinobi holds the decisions that survive across sessions, actively searches your past dead ends — semantically — before the agent writes code, and routes approvals to your phone. One brain, every device: laptop, cloud session, and mobile all wired to the same store.

Works with Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, Zed — any MCP-compatible client.

Status: v0.3 — autonomous agents. Run it as a hosted HTTP /mcp brain (the default deploy) or self-host a local instance. Mobile push, a headless dispatch loop, parallel swarm over git worktrees, and audit→subtask ingestion on top of the remote MCP foundation. 39 MCP tools, web dashboard, mobile approvals, plugin system, optional semantic recall.

What it does

Most tools try to be a memory bolt-on. Shinobi is the task spine your agent works along — the durable backbone of work, decisions, and known-bad paths that outlives any single session and follows you across every device.

• Task spine — projects + subtasks the agent claims, completes, or pivots; the persistent skeleton of multi-session work
• Decisions that survive — record architectural choices with rationale so the next session (on any device) doesn't re-litigate them
• Dead ends, searched before you build — every failed approach is logged and semantically matched the moment an agent plans a similar one, so it never burns a second session on the same wall. No other tool does this.
• Approvals on your phone — request_approval pushes the decision to your pocket; the agent blocks until you tap yes/no, wherever you are
• One brain, every device — laptop editor, Claude Code cloud session, and mobile chat all hit the same store over remote MCP; no sync step, no per-device drift
• Plans — versioned plan snapshots, retrievable mid-task
• Context — per-project conventions, "don't touch" rules, test patterns, deploy notes, file annotations
• Recall — fulltext (FTS5) by default, semantic (embedding-backed) when an embedding provider is configured
• Notes — free-form annotations and voice notes (audio_path field)
• Activity timeline — every write path lands in the timeline so you can replay what happened
• Git linking — link_commit ties commits to subtasks via [SHI-N] tags or via target_path attribution
• Web dashboard — Hono-served Kanban + decisions + dead ends + notes + plans + context + timeline + analytics
• Plugin system — drop a .js file in ~/.shinobi/plugins/ or install a @shinobi/plugin-* npm package and register custom plugin_* tools

Hosted or self-hosted, your call. The default deploy is one remote brain behind an HTTP /mcp endpoint (we run ours at shinobi.shinobi-apps.com); the same binary still runs as a fully local single-machine instance when you'd rather keep everything on your own box. BYO embedding provider only if you want semantic recall.

🚀 New here? Follow Getting started — zero to a working brain in ten minutes. Going multi-device? Remote mode

• $0/month cloud deploy.

Install

Requirements:

• Node.js 18+ on PATH
• C++ build toolchain for better-sqlite3 native build (most systems have prebuilt binaries; Windows may need Visual Studio Build Tools as fallback)

From npm (recommended)

npm install -g @shinobiapps/shinobi

The binary is shinobi (e.g. shinobi serve, shinobi dashboard).

From GitHub (latest, unreleased)

npm install -g github:numbererikson/shinobi

Pulls from main. Useful for trying unreleased fixes. On Windows you may need to add your Node directory to system PATH before this works, because the prepare build script runs in a subshell that does not always inherit per-session PATH (Laragon, portable installs). If install fails with 'node' is not recognized, prefer the npm install above.

From a cloned source folder (for development / contributing)

git clone https://github.com/numbererikson/shinobi.git
cd shinobi
npm install            # triggers `prepare` → builds dist/
npm install -g .

Then bootstrap

In any project root where you want Shinobi available to your MCP client:

shinobi init
shinobi dashboard

init will:

1. Create ~/.shinobi/ with config.json, .env template, and shinobi.db (migrations applied)
2. Drop a .mcp.json snippet for the current project
3. Print next steps

shinobi init writes config for the two clients with a workspace-local MCP convention out of the box:

• Claude Code — <workspace>/.mcp.json
• Cursor — <workspace>/.cursor/mcp.json

Restart the client and the mcp__shinobi__* tools become available.

For other MCP clients (Cline, Continue.dev, Zed), see the MCP client setup section below.

Then open:

http://127.0.0.1:8765

On Windows PowerShell, if script execution blocks shinobi, use the .cmd shim:

shinobi.cmd dashboard

If you upgraded Node or copied an old node_modules, rebuild native dependencies:

npm rebuild better-sqlite3

Important: the code lives in the Shinobi folder, but the local memory database lives in:

~/.shinobi/shinobi.db

To move the tool only, copy/clone the Shinobi folder and run the install commands above. To move the existing projects, tasks, decisions, notes, and context too, either copy ~/.shinobi/ or use shinobi sync.

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