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cars runs on your machine with your Claude CLI login. There is no hosted service and no account to sign up for.

Check for a releaseHow it works

Availability

Public builds are published by the release workflow to the public catesworks/cars-releases repository when a version tag is pushed. As of November 2026 that repository has no release, so there is no binary to download yet.

The npm package @cars/cli is not on the public registry yet. When a release ships, its assets on the releases page are the list of supported platforms.

  1. Step 1

    Install and sign in to the Claude CLI

    Every story agent is a claude CLI process and inherits its login, so no API key is needed for the default planner and agents.

  2. Step 2

    Get a cars build

    Download it from the releases page once a release exists. Until then, contact us about access.

  3. Step 3

    Run it in your repository

    Run cars to open the Welcome screen, or cars "<goal>" to go straight to planning. --cwd points it at another directory.

  4. Step 4

    Review, run, merge

    Accept the plan, watch the run in the TUI, then review the pull request the Finalizer opens.

First commands

# open the Welcome screen
cars

# plan and run a goal
cars "Add a health-check endpoint with tests"

# at most 3 stories at once, 5-minute story timeout
cars --parallel 3 --timeout 300 "Split the settings page into tabs"

# write the plan to prd.json only, then run it later
cars --dry-run "Add pagination to the orders list"
cars --resume

What you need

  • The Claude CLI, installed and signed in
  • Node.js 20 or later (the orchestrator runtime)
  • git, and a repository to work in
  • Optional: gh (GitHub) or az (Azure DevOps) for the pull request
  • Optional: an OpenAI key, only for --planner openai