What is Hive Commons?
Hive Commons is the umbrella community for Hive — an AI-agent fleet orchestration system that runs governed swarms of coding agents against real repositories — and for the family of tools that grew up around it.
Our founding premise: human judgment is the scarce resource. Agents are tooling. Every decision, every merge, and every identity belongs to a named human, and governance is enforced in code rather than in prose.
What Hive does
Hive is a control layer for running governed fleets of AI coding agents. Agents pick up issues, open pull requests, review code, repair CI, and answer contributors — under a six-level maturity model (ACMM, the AI-native Capability Maturity Model) that decides exactly what they may do and enforces it with matching least-privilege GitHub token scopes.
- Hub and spokes. A single Go binary that runs as a Kubernetes workload, a Docker Compose stack, or Podman Quadlet units. An optional hub coordinates many self-hosted spoke hives, with a public registry and cross-hive leaderboards.
- Governance in code. Trust is dialed up capability at a time, from advisory-only (L1) through to merging on green CI (L6).
- Audited and accountable. A deterministic pipeline handles filtering, classification, and merge-gating before any LLM sees the work; agents handle judgment calls, and every action lands in the audit log.
Hive is used in production by KubeStellar Console, tunaos.org, and Project Bluefin; see ADOPTERS.md for the current list.
The project family
Hive is the orchestration system and the delivery surface for the family. Each tool beside it removes a specific piece of friction from working with agents, and each is useful on its own.
| Project | What it does | Docs |
|---|---|---|
| Hive — flagship | A control layer for running governed fleets of AI coding agents against real repositories. | Hive docs |
| Spektacular — newest member | Spec-driven development for AI coding agents. A markdown spec becomes a reviewed plan and an agent-driven implementation, each step a resumable state machine. | Spektacular docs · spektacular.dev |
| hotshot | Screenshots that land directly in an AI coding assistant’s terminal. | hotshot docs |
| pluk | Structured event streaming for tmux sessions running AI coding agents. | pluk docs |
| promptargs | Template expansion for prompts across Claude Code, Copilot, Goose, Bob, and others. | promptargs docs |
| rationguard | Detects and rebuts rationalization patterns in agent output. | rationguard docs |
| dibs | A contributor attribution layer for the AI-agent era. Your idea, your credit, their code. | README |
How the pieces fit
Spektacular handles one feature at a time: spec → plan → implement, with a human review between each step. Hive is where that work is scaled up — it orchestrates fleets of agents across repositories with the governance and audit trail that running agents at that scale demands. A Spektacular workflow is the unit of work a fleet orchestrator schedules. hotshot, pluk, promptargs, rationguard and dibs sit alongside both, making the individual agent session more observable, more reproducible, and properly attributed.
An open community
Every repository in the organization is Apache 2.0 licensed, requires DCO sign-off on every commit, and follows the CNCF Code of Conduct. Hive is maintained by a Maintainer Committee spanning multiple organizations, with a documented contributor ladder and explicit governance for AI-agent contributions. Hive Commons has applied for the CNCF Sandbox.
- Governance · Maintainers · Code of Conduct · Security policy
- Mailing list: hivecommons-dev@googlegroups.com — joining adds the community meeting to your calendar
- Community meeting: every other Thursday, 10:00 AM ET — agenda and notes · recordings
- Chat: Discord
- Website: hivecommons.dev
Is your project a fit?
If you maintain an open source project that removes friction from working with AI coding agents and you share these values, we’d like to hear from you. See Join Hive Commons.