claude-octopus

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One brain, many arms.

An MCP server that wraps the Claude Agent SDK, letting you run multiple specialized Claude Code agents — each with its own model, tools, system prompt, and personality — from any MCP client.

Claude Code is powerful. But one instance does everything the same way. Sometimes you want a strict code reviewer that only reads files. A test writer that defaults to TDD. A cheap quick helper on Haiku. A deep thinker on Opus.

Claude Octopus lets you spin up as many of these as you need. Same binary, different configurations. Each one shows up as a separate tool in your MCP client.

• Node.js >= 18
• Claude Code — the Claude Agent SDK is bundled as a dependency, but it spawns Claude Code under the hood, so you need a working claude CLI installation
• Anthropic API key (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY env var) or an active Claude Code OAuth session

npm install claude-octopus

Or skip the install entirely — use npx directly in your .mcp.json (see Quick Start below).

Add to your .mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "claude": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["claude-octopus@latest"],
      "env": {
        "CLAUDE_PERMISSION_MODE": "bypassPermissions"
      }
    }
  }
}

This gives you two tools: claude_code and claude_code_reply. That's it — you have Claude Code as a tool.

The real power is running several instances with different configurations:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "code-reviewer": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["claude-octopus@latest"],
      "env": {
        "CLAUDE_TOOL_NAME": "code_reviewer",