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Lore – Give your coding agent the decisions your team made

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Re: Lore – Give your coding agent the decisions your team made

#3

Post by tcballard »

Author here! Coding agents kept reworking decisions we'd already settled - reviving an approach we ruled out in an ADR, redoing something a requirement already pinned. The context was in the repo; the agent had no current view of it.

Lore serves your team's durable knowledge - requirements, decisions, designs, roadmaps, prompts - all as typed Markdown, read-only to Claude Code / Cursor over MCP, so the agent cites your decisions instead of contradicting them.

The bet: retrieval is deterministic. No embeddings, no vector store, no model call to pick what's relevant — same query, same bytes, same result, offline. It's not a RAG competitor; it composes — recall fuzzily, then verify the EXACT, CURRENT decision in Lore (it declines the ones you've superseded). Runs in CI (rac validate / rac gate) too.

  pipx install rac-core
  rac quickstart
  claude mcp add lore -- rac mcp
What it isn't: a search index, a memory layer, or an AI feature — the engine makes no LLM calls, no telemetry unless you opt in. Early, and my corpus is small, so I'd like to hear where deterministic grounding breaks down for you vs. where fuzzy recall is enough.

(Lore is the product; the engine under it is RAC — Requirements as Code, the `rac` package.) Apache-2.0, typed.

Re: Lore – Give your coding agent the decisions your team made

#7

Post by brainless »

I started building an app with similar goals but with the very different approach. I work on my own coding agent, https://github.com/brainless/nocodo, where I have been trying to build a provenance based engine that will generate or modify prompts to point to the decisions that a team has made. That work is in the branch: feature/praxis_agent_runtime

While working on this I figured what if I build a proxy for coding agents - Claude Code, opencode, Codex, etc. support a proxy. This proxy would edit prompts and tool_calls and feed context from an internal index it will maintain. That index will contain git logs, GitHub/JIRA/etc tickets/epics, PRD or other documents, tech stack setup.

It is just an idea and may not work but working at the proxy layer means this can be deployed at a team level, needs no MCP install and can re-shape prompts for everyone depending on the project. Wild idea perhaps.

Re: Lore – Give your coding agent the decisions your team made

#8

Post by tcballard »

etoxin wrote: post #5
alexmartos wrote: post #4

How does this compare to CLAUDE.md and other Rules you can put in markdown?

Or spec-driven AI development.

Good questions! Lore isn't really competing with CLAUDE.md, it sits under it.

A CLAUDE.md (or AGENTS.md, etc) is typically hand-written, untyped, and never checked. Nothing stops it from still telling the agent to do something you reversed six months ago, and nobody validates it in CI.

Lore keeps the actual decisions/requirements/designs as typed Markdown in your repo, and rac export --agent-rules generates those rules files from the decisions that are currently Accepted — superseded ones drop out automatically. So the rules file becomes a build artifact of your knowledge base instead of something you hand-maintain and hope stays current. (Note that in dogfooding Lore that its repo does exactly that: its CLAUDE.md is a ~20-line router into the validated corpus)

The part that makes it more than markdown-with-a-schema is write-time enforcement. rac validate / rac gate run in CI and fail the merge if an artifact is malformed, a link is broken or ambiguous, or anything points at a superseded decision. At serve time it's a read-only MCP server doing deterministic retrieval — the exact current decision by ID, not similarity-ranked guesses. No RAG, no embeddings, no model call to decide what's relevant.

On spec-driven dev (Spec Kit, OpenSpec, Kiro): those drive a change — proposal → design → tasks → implementation, usually archived when the feature ships. Lore holds the durable why that outlives any single change and gets served to the agent on every session. It's the layer above SDD, not a replacement — you'd point a spec tool at the decisions Lore is enforcing.

Re: Lore – Give your coding agent the decisions your team made

#10

Post by tcballard »

philbo wrote: post #9

1. Write ADRs (or get agents to write them) 2. Commit ADRs to git 3. Mention ADRs in AGENTS.md

I agree, that method might work if you are working solo or in a small team - but for organisations the ability to centrally manage and gate this sort of ruleset avoids drift.
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