chapmanjw/rutherford-kiro-crew-app

Rutherford — Kiro Crew App  |  MCP Server

Give your AI coding agent a crew — as a Kiro Crew app.

A Kiro Crew app that registers the Rutherford MCP server, installs the Rutherford skills, and ships the rutherford-orchestrator agent to set up, configure, and drive a crew of coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Goose, and more — over the Agent Client Protocol. Hand work to one agent, ask several in parallel, or have them argue it out.

This repo is the Kiro Crew port of the Rutherford Claude plugin. Because GitHub does not allow a single account to own both a repo and a fork of it, this is not a GitHub “forked from” repo — instead it descends from the plugin’s git history and tracks it as the upstream remote, so git diff upstream/main and git pull upstream main work as they would on a fork.

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Install into Kiro Crew

Prerequisite: uv on your PATH — the app launches the MCP server with uvx.

This repo doubles as its own external registry: its root holds an app-registry.json index that lists this app. So you can add the repo as a registry and install Rutherford one-click from the App Store — no clone required. (The manual git clone + kirocrew app install route still works and is documented below as the contributor path.)

App Store install (recommended)

1. Add this repo as a registry. In the dashboard, go to Settings → Apps → Registries → Add and enter:

   Field	Value
   Name	Rutherford
   Repo	https://github.com/chapmanjw/rutherford-kiro-crew-app
   Branch	main
   Trust	index

   Or add it to the registries list in ~/.kiro/crew/config.json:

   {
     "registries": [
       {
         "name": "Rutherford",
         "repo": "https://github.com/chapmanjw/rutherford-kiro-crew-app",
         "branch": "main",
         "trust": "index"
       }
     ]
   }
   

   Kiro Crew reads the repo’s app-registry.json, and Rutherford appears in the App Store.

2. Install Rutherford from the App Store (Browse → Rutherford → Install). Kiro Crew clones this repo and reads app.json from its root.

3. Grant trust. Rutherford is a third-party app; Kiro Crew gates its agent and MCP server behind an explicit trust grant, so until you grant it, enable registers nothing executable — no rutherford-orchestrator agent and no rutherford MCP server. Grant it in the dashboard consent prompt, or add "rutherford" to agent.apps_trusted in ~/.kiro/crew/config.json:

   {
     "agent": {
       "apps_trusted": ["rutherford"]
     }
   }
   

   (Third-party apps are disabled by default; the master toggle is under Settings → Security.) Uninstalling the app clears the grant.

4. Enable the app (the App Store’s Enable button, or kirocrew app enable rutherford).

Note: agent.apps_allow_third_party = true trusts every present and future third-party app, not just Rutherford — prefer the app-scoped grant above unless you deliberately want to trust all apps.

Trust tier: use trust: "index" (the default and recommended posture). The registry’s index is treated as untrusted content, so each listed app clones credential-free — which is exactly right for a public repo. trust: "owner" is only meaningful for an edition-pinned registry under your own change control and is not needed here.

Local install from a checkout (contributor path)

You can also install directly from a local checkout — the path contributors use when iterating on the app before pushing:

1. Clone and install from the checkout:

   git clone https://github.com/chapmanjw/rutherford-kiro-crew-app
   kirocrew app install ./rutherford-kiro-crew-app
   

   (In the dashboard, use the equivalent install-from-path / install-from-source action pointed at the checkout.)

2. Grant trust and enable exactly as in steps 3–4 above.

With trust granted, enabling (via either path) registers the Rutherford MCP server (via uvx rutherford-mcp-server), installs the Rutherford skills into ~/.kiro/crew/skills/rutherford/, and makes the rutherford-orchestrator agent available in the dashboard agent selector and as a subagent.

Select rutherford-orchestrator from the agent dropdown to run a whole session as the crew router: Sam health-checks the crew with doctor and routes each request to the right mode (delegate, consensus, debate, review, or plan).

Editing a skill takes effect after the app reloads; manifest, agent, and MCP changes need a re-enable (kirocrew app disable rutherford then kirocrew app enable rutherford).

Hosting your own registry that also lists other apps (advanced)

This repo already is a valid registry that lists itself (see app-registry.json at the root), so you do not need to host anything to install Rutherford — the App Store path above is the supported one. But if you want a single team registry that lists Rutherford alongside your own apps, host a git repo whose root contains an app-registry.json index. That file is a JSON array of entries, each pointing at an app repo (the required fields are name plus a clone URL in gitUrl, with repo accepted as a legacy alias; branch is optional and defaults to main; subdirectory is optional and defaults to the repo root, so omit it when the app’s app.json is at the repo root):

[
  { "name": "rutherford", "gitUrl": "https://github.com/chapmanjw/rutherford-kiro-crew-app", "branch": "main" },
  { "name": "your-app", "gitUrl": "https://github.com/your-team/your-app", "branch": "main" }
]

Users opt in by adding your registry repo to the registries list in ~/.kiro/crew/config.json (or via Settings → Apps → Registries):

{
  "registries": [
    { "name": "my-team", "repo": "https://github.com/my-team/my-kirocrew-registry", "branch": "main", "trust": "index" }
  ]
}

The repo here is the registry repo — the one holding app-registry.json. For a separate team registry that is a different repo from the apps it lists; for this project the registry repo and the app repo are the same repo, because its app-registry.json lists itself. Kiro Crew reads the index, and each listed app installs one-click with a trust grant. See the Federated external registries docs.

What this app is

Rutherford gives your coding agent a crew. This is the Kiro Crew-facing package: it registers the Rutherford MCP server — a stdio server that speaks the Agent Client Protocol to each coding agent — and adds the skills and an orchestrator agent that drive it.

From inside Kiro Crew you hand one task to one agent, ask several the same question in parallel, have them argue across rounds, or run a multi-model code review, using agents you already log into. Rutherford reuses each agent’s own login and never calls a model provider’s API.

The app launches the server with the pinned uvx [email protected], which fetches it from PyPI on first run and caches it, so there is no separate install step (you do need uv on your PATH, since uvx ships with it). You can install the server yourself with uv tool install rutherford-mcp-server (or pipx install rutherford-mcp-server), but a PATH-installed binary is not used automatically: the manifest always runs the pinned uvx invocation. To use your own install, edit app.json’s mcpServers.rutherford command. The setup-rutherford skill covers that path.

What’s inside

Skills

Setup and configuration:

Driving the crew:

Agent

rutherford-orchestrator — health-checks the crew with doctor, then routes a request to the right mode: delegate, consensus, debate, review, or plan. The seven original slash commands (setup, doctor, panels, permissions, consensus, debate, review) are folded into this agent’s routing — ask for the mode in plain language and it runs it. Select it from the dashboard agent selector, or invoke it as a subagent from any session.

MCP server

The app declares the Rutherford MCP server in its manifest, launched as uvx rutherford-mcp-server. It exposes 18 tools and 19 built-in agents.

Kiro Crew
   |  MCP over stdio
rutherford-mcp-server          (the ACP client)
   |  ACP over stdio, one session per voice
   +--> claude-agent-acp, codex-acp, goose acp, cursor-agent acp, ... 19 built-in agents

Safety

Everything defaults to read-only. The write and yolo modes are explicit opt-in behind a trusted-workspace gate, and the deliberation tools (consensus, debate, review, plan) never write. See reference/safety.md and the safe-write-delegation skill.

Documentation

The app bundles reference docs that the skills cite: tools, safety, panels, config, permissions, and persona. For the full server reference, see the rutherford-mcp-server docs.

Relationship to the Claude plugin

This app is a straight port of the Rutherford Claude plugin. The plugin lives in its own repo and is tracked here as the upstream remote; no copies of its Claude-specific files are kept in this repo. The live Kiro Crew surface is defined by app.json, the converted agents/*.json, and the skills/ directory. Track upstream changes with:

git remote -v            # upstream -> rutherford-claude-plugin
git fetch upstream
git diff upstream/main

The name

.---------.
|  \/\/\/ |
|  O  [==]|
|    <    |
|  \___/  |
'---------'
-- Ensign Sam Rutherford --
USS Cerritos . Engineering

Named for the cheerful engineer aboard the USS Cerritos in Star Trek: Lower Decks, who has a gift for getting heterogeneous systems to cooperate. Star Trek and Lower Decks are trademarks of their respective owners; this is an unaffiliated, fan-named open-source project.

Versioning and publishing

The app’s version lives in app.json as a semver version, validated by Kiro Crew’s app manifest. There is no marketplace manifest for the Kiro Crew surface. This repo distributes in two ways off the same source: it doubles as its own external registry — its root app-registry.json lists this app, so users can add the repo as a registry and install one-click from the App Store — and it also installs directly from a local checkout (kirocrew app install) for contributors iterating before they push.

To cut a release: bump version in app.json, add a dated ## [X.Y.Z] entry to CHANGELOG.md, commit, then tag vX.Y.Z and push the tag. app.json is the sole version source of truth, and scripts/validate-app.mjs validates it — and the app-registry.json index — on every push. Because the registry index points at branch: main, an App Store install always tracks the tip of main; the tag is the human-readable release marker.

Coming from the Claude plugin: it versioned through its own manifest and installed with a Claude Code plugin command; the Kiro Crew app versions through app.json and installs with kirocrew app install.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md, CHANGELOG.md, and SECURITY.md.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.