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• Apache Magpie
  • See it in action
  • Install
  • Usage
  • Update / maintain
  • Skill families
    • External skill sources
  • Acknowledgements
  • Cross-references

Apache Magpie

Adopt a Magpie. Magpie is a curated set of skills for the AI agent you already use — Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, Copilot and others — that take on the repetitive parts of running an open-source project: triaging issues and pull requests, reviewing code, mentoring contributors, drafting fixes, and handling security reports end to end.

Three things make it different from a folder of prompts:

• Nothing is sent in your name. Every comment, email, label and PR is drafted by the agent and posted by a person. There is no autonomous mode.
• The agent is confined before it reads anything real. A filesystem and network sandbox, a credential-stripped environment, and a deterministic guard that inspects each shell command before it runs and denies the ones that break a hard rule — not a prompt asking it nicely.
• It is an Apache project, not a product. Apache-2.0, vendor-neutral across agents, no account and no service in the middle. Telemetry is opt-in per project and off by default — install it and never run a skill, and it generates no outbound traffic at all.

Magpie is currently in development for ASF projects + Python Core team friendlies. Testers welcome!

See it in action

One security report, start to finish — installed from the marketplace, the agent sandboxed and guarded, then the report imported, triaged against the project's history, fixed, and published as a CVE:

Illustrative — a written transcript, rendered deterministically, not a recording. The interactive version on the project site steps through the same story with the full output of each command.

[!IMPORTANT] The motivation, scope, and design commitments behind this work live in MISSION.md — the founding mission of the Apache Magpie Top-Level Project, originally filed as its establishment proposal. Read that for the why; this README is the how once you've decided to install.

Install

Start here → Quick start — a handful of commands, in the agent you already use. Nothing is written to your repository.

/plugin marketplace add apache/magpie                # Claude Code
/plugin install magpie-setup@apache-magpie           # install this one first
/plugin install magpie-agent-guard@apache-magpie     # the baseline:
/plugin install magpie-utilities@apache-magpie       #   take all three
/plugin install magpie-pr-management@apache-magpie   # + the families you need

Those first three are the baseline — and the same set a project commits as its floor when it adopts Magpie, so taking them is taking what a project would recommend to every contributor. After that, install one plugin per family you actually want: every installed skill costs context on every turn, used or not (~0.2–2.0k tokens a family), so there is deliberately no install-everything plugin.

Once magpie-setup is in, you never type these again — ask in plain language (“install the Magpie families for PR review”) and the setup skill runs the installs for you.

Codex, VS Code / Copilot, and Gemini are one-liners too — the quick start has all four, plus what to run next to put the agent in its sandbox. Nothing is committed to your repository.

Fallback — the pinned snapshot install. Use it when a marketplace is not an option or not enough: your agent has no plugin mechanism, you need the signed ASF source release rather than a git clone, or the project wants every contributor and CI job pinned to one committed version with drift detection.

1. Download / pin a release
2. Set up the symlinks and git-ignores — see docs/setup/install-recipes.md
3. Ask your agent to complete the install: /magpie-setup install

The two are complementary, not exclusive.

Usage

Magpie is used by interacting with your AI agents. You'll use plain-language prompts like

review PR #5193

or

triage the latest security reports

or skill calls starting with a slash, like

/magpie-repo-health:dependency-audit

(the family-plugin form, assuming the recommended marketplace install above — see Skill names differ by install method if you're on the pinned-snapshot fallback instead).

Update / maintain

Marketplace install (the recommended path above):

• /plugin marketplace update apache-magpie then /plugin update <plugin>@apache-magpie — refresh the marketplace metadata, then bump the installed plugin(s) to its latest.
• Add or drop families by installing or uninstalling their plugin — there is no separate “pick families” step once you're on a marketplace install.

Pinned-snapshot install (the fallback):

• /magpie-setup upgrade — refresh the snapshot to a newer framework version + reconcile any overrides against the new framework structure.
• /magpie-setup verify — read-only health check (snapshot intact, symlinks live, .gitignore correct, etc.).
• /magpie-setup override <framework-skill> — open or scaffold an override file for a framework skill.

Skill families

The following skill families ship in the framework, all at experimental or stable, and each skill declares its family in a family: frontmatter key. On the recommended marketplace install, you choose families by which per-family plugin(s) you install (see Install above) — install or uninstall a plugin at any time to add or drop a family. On the pinned-snapshot fallback, /magpie-setup offers the opt-in families — and the optional MCP servers (ponymail, apache-projects, gmail-plaintext) — in a single install choice, and symlinks for the picked families land in the skill directory. Either way, the two always-on families (setup, utilities) are wired unconditionally and never prompted for.

The Modes column maps each family to the MISSION agent-assistance taxonomy — see docs/modes.md for what each mode means and which modes are still proposed vs. shipping today.

External skill sources

Skill families or individual skills can be pulled from a trusted external source — a repo other than apache/magpie that ships Magpie-shaped skills (with their evals and tests). Where a skill directory would sit, a skills/<name>/source.md redirect names a pinned, verified source the adopter has vouched for; /magpie-setup fetches it into the gitignored snapshot and wires it in exactly like a framework skill. Nothing is fetched unless the adopter commits the pin — see docs/skill-sources/, PRINCIPLES.md §13, and RFC-AI-0006.

Acknowledgements

Apache Magpie was first developed and proven inside Apache Airflow, and was maintained for a time as the apache/airflow-steward repository under the Airflow PMC before being renamed and established as its own project. It also incorporates early skill work contributed by way of the Apache Groovy community. All of that code carries the same rightsholder — Copyright The Apache Software Foundation, under the Apache License 2.0 — so it is not a third-party inclusion; the required attribution lines from the originating projects' NOTICE files are reproduced in NOTICE.

Cross-references

• MISSION.md — founding mission of the established TLP: motivation, scope, design commitments, initial PMC composition target.
• docs/setup/agentic-overrides.md — the contract between adopters who write overrides and framework skills that read them.
• docs/prerequisites.md — what a maintainer needs installed before invoking any framework skill (Claude Code, Gmail MCP, GitHub auth, browser, uv, etc.).
• docs/source-release-contents.md — what ships in the signed apache-magpie-<version>-source.zip (and what is excluded), with the rationale for the repository-root metadata/config files it keeps.
• docs/release-management/manual-release-process.md — the concrete, as-executed runbook for cutting a Magpie release by hand on the current hybrid SVN-dist + ATR-vote backend (with the abstract per-backend runbooks and the 14-step lifecycle alongside it in docs/release-management/).
• AGENTS.md — agent instructions, placeholder convention, framework conventions.
• CONTRIBUTING.md — for framework contributors.