What is contractor?

Contractor installs a structured workflow for Claude into any code repository with a single command, so instead of writing code directly, Claude works more like a senior contractor managing a small team. It researches a task before building it, plans before executing, hands off the actual coding work to a group of specialized sub-agents, has other agents review everything before it merges, and never commits directly to your main branch. The install drops in a CLAUDE.md instructions file and a .claude folder containing several defined roles: an orchestrator that owns overall strategy and git operations, a task-manager that keeps a backlog of work, an architect that only designs and never writes code, a swarm of builder agents that carry out the actual coding in parallel, and independent reviewers that check correctness, security, performance, and silent failures before anything merges. No single agent both writes and approves its own work. It also installs safety hooks that scan for secrets, block dangerous commands, and protect certain files from being touched, plus a persistent knowledge vault so decisions and gotchas carry over between sessions instead of being forgotten. You install it by running a single npx command from the root of your repository, which copies in the instructions and agent files, backing up anything it overwrites. After that, you copy an example config file, fill it in with your project's details, and run a fill command to complete setup. From there, you interact with the task-manager rather than individual agents: you describe a goal in plain language, address the task-manager directly to plan work, or point it at an existing reference like a legacy app or a spec file so it can work toward matching that reference. The task-manager then releases batches of independent tasks that run through the pipeline together rather than one at a time. The project is distributed on npm and GitHub under the MIT license.