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CommitLore

Your agents inherit the code.

Make them inherit the judgment.

The Git-native decision layer for coding agents.

Every fresh agent can read the implementation. None of them can recover the constraints, the alternatives your team rejected, the warnings, or the verification gaps — those disappear when the session that held them ends.

CommitLore preserves that engineering judgment in Git, and surfaces only the decisions still in force before the next edit. A decision that was later superseded or expired does not reach the agent as if it still stood.

Repository-owned · Lifecycle-aware · Evidence-verified · Agent-independent

Claude Code · Codex · Cursor · Gemini CLI · OpenCode · Windsurf

No hosted memory service. No vendor-specific chat history. Just reviewable decision context, owned by and portable with the repository.

Install once. Your coding agent can record the decisions worth carrying forward, while CommitLore validates and preserves them in Git.

Claude Code — one plugin registers the MCP server, the pre-edit context hook and the skills:

/plugin marketplace add MongLong0214/commitlore
/plugin install commitlore@commitlore

That is the whole plugin: the MCP server, the pre-edit hook and the skills. It puts no commitlore on PATH, so the commitlore … commands below come from install.sh / install.ps1 and need that install as well.

Prerequisites for either path: Node.js 22+ and Git. The script checks both before it writes anything.

Any other coding agent — install the CLI:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MongLong0214/commitlore/v0.6.0/install.sh | sh

Which hosts are supported, and what each install path requires: docs/COMPATIBILITY.md.

Give your next agent the judgment your last one earned.

See it work

A fresh agent. Zero chat history. It still knows why the obvious fix was rejected. Query a path before changing it:

commitlore context install.sh

The output includes the active record that ruled out publishing a -musl target as the fix for the installer defect, including its reason. The hook returns context; it does not claim to block the edit.

context for install.sh as of <timestamp> — 0 limits, 1 ruled-out, 1 warnings, 2 other in 1 record (no index, 1 commit record(s) scanned)

ruled-out
  r-instci99a  <commit>  [claim]  Publish a -musl release target | a release.yml/build-matrix change, not an install.sh or CI-verification fix

warnings
  r-instci99a  <commit>  [claim]  Revisit this wording if a musl target ships

Reproducing that exact PreToolUse hook path, and every other command: docs/cli.md.

Retrieval can find records. Path scope keeps reversed decisions out.

Missing a record costs the model context. Handing it a decision that was already reversed costs it correctness. In this retrieval measurement, at every size from 0 to 10,000 distractors, BM25, embedding top-k, hybrid RRF, and embedding with a path filter each returned one superseded record. CommitLore path scope with lifecycle returned zero stale records and both current records (2/2).

Recall is the supporting result: retrieval finds broadly the same records either way, but only one route knows which are still current. The advantage appears when decisions have been reversed—the case this product exists for.

The separate #167 exposure run still matters: only 2 of 10,002 records reached the model.

route	model-visible records	relevant records	model-visible tokens
inject everything	10,002	2/2	1,004,554
top-k lexical	2	1/2	190
CommitLore path scope	2	2/2	335

This measures exposure and recall at a fixed two-record output budget—not token cost, billed cost, accuracy, or agent behaviour. It is one corpus, one query, and one pinned embedding model. Where recall ties, and what else has and has not been measured: docs/evidence.md.

Try it in a repository

Then run commitlore init in each repository where you want validation hooks and a local index. The installer detects supported coding agents and registers the local MCP server where it can do so safely.

cd your-repository
commitlore init
commitlore context .

After that:

• Commit normally. Most commits carry no record.
• If a record is present, the commit-msg hook validates it; it never creates one.
• Agents query decision context through MCP or receive it from the PreToolUse hook.
• Before changing a path, they see its active limits, ruled-out alternatives, warnings, and verification gaps.

Keep working through your coding agent. When a change contains decision context the diff cannot preserve, ask the agent to include a CommitLore record in the commit.

Prefer to inspect or pin the installation?

The one-liner is for convenience. For a reviewed or pinned install, download and inspect install.sh first, or clone the repository. The script installs a pinned source checkout and a thin wrapper that runs node <checkout>/dist/commitlore.mjs — it downloads no compiled artifact and runs no build step, so what it puts on your machine is the source you can read.

# Pin and inspect the installer before executing it.
curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/MongLong0214/commitlore/v0.6.0/install.sh
sh install.sh v0.6.0

# Or skip the script entirely: the checkout it makes is one you can make yourself.
git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.6.0 https://github.com/MongLong0214/commitlore
node commitlore/dist/commitlore.mjs --version

The code survived. The decision didn't.

Stop re-reviewing the same bad idea.

Without CommitLore. A new session sees two functions with similar inputs and reuses one.

calculatePrice(input, { isAdminPreview: true, skipCoupon: true });

The team now has another flag, another wrapper, and another compatibility branch protecting a use case the function was never meant to own. The reviewer writes "we already rejected this" for the second time.

With CommitLore. Before editing, the agent receives:

commitlore: active records for src/pricing.ts

Limit
  [claim]      r-price01  87e36511  calculatePrice owns final checkout pricing only

Ruled-out
  [claim]      r-price01  87e36511  Reuse checkout pricing for admin quotes | eligibility
                                    and rounding semantics differ between the two flows

[claim] is doing real work: this record was not written by a trusted author of the repository, so the agent is told to treat it as information rather than as an order. A record that was signed by a trusted author renders as [directive].

It shares the pure calculation primitives instead, and leaves the checkout policy entrypoint alone. The review never happens, because the decision was already there.

How it works

1. Capture — the agent drafts only the decision context a diff cannot show.
2. Verify — CommitLore checks that draft against the session and the staged diff.
3. Preserve — the verified record lives in Git, with identity and a lifecycle.
4. Deliver — before editing a path, the next agent receives only the decisions still in force.

What it looks like on a real repository

From a field report on a ~768-commit Swift MCP server, one day after installing. Naming one file path surfaced a merged pull request the engineer did not know existed, and it changed what the surviving code meant.

I did not know that commit existed. It is a merged PR from two weeks earlier that had already removed eight of these sites and replaced each with an accessibility-native equivalent, every one fail-closed and live-verified.

None of this was in any chat history. It was in the repository, and I got it by naming a file path.

The alternative was reading two weeks of merged pull requests to find it. That is not something an agent does spontaneously, and not something a person does before every edit. Adoption cost, from the same report: one command, and 7.4 seconds to index 768 commits. Nothing touched history or the working tree. The console output and the full report are in docs/evidence.md.

Three properties no hosted chat-history product can offer, and the reason the authority is Git rather than a service:

• Reviewable. A decision arrives as a commit trailer in a pull request, where it can be argued with before it becomes authority.
• Owned by the repository. No account, no vendor, nothing to lose access to.
• Travels with a clone. A new machine, a new contributor, or a new agent gets the decisions with the code.

What makes it different

Tool	What it remembers
CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md	how the agent should work
ADRs	large architecture decisions, as documents
Chat memory / RAG	related text from the past
CommitLore	which decisions still apply to this code path

Similarity search can find a related decision. CommitLore also knows whether that decision is still active, superseded, or expired — and shows only the first.

The authority is ordinary commit trailers and refs/notes/commitlore. Indexes and reports are derived and rebuildable from those Git records.

Where it pays off

Protect a module boundary. "calculatePrice owns final checkout pricing only. Do not reuse it for admin previews."

Preserve a rejected workaround. "Raising the timeout hides the connection leak. Fix the cleanup path instead."

Mark temporary compatibility code. "This caller is temporary and is not part of the supported contract."

Carry a verification gap. "Single-user behaviour was tested. Concurrent refresh remains unverified."

Each is a sentence a diff cannot carry and a reviewer would otherwise have to say twice.

How records get created

You do not hand-write a trailer for every commit. Most commits should carry no record at all. Add one only for a decision the diff cannot recover: an external constraint, a rejected alternative, a warning, or a verification gap.

Ask the agent to commit normally and preserve only the decision context the diff cannot explain:

Commit this change. Add a CommitLore record only if the diff cannot recover an important constraint, rejected alternative, warning, or verification gap.

The agent instructions live in skills/commitlore-commits/, and the commit-msg hook validates any record the agent adds — it never invents or silently adds one. The harvest route, the capture transaction, and the escape hatch of writing trailers by hand are all in docs/capture.md.

A complete record

A record can be much smaller than this; most need only a few fields. This one uses the whole vocabulary because it is also a conformance fixture — Git's trailer parser reads the code block identically in every translated README.

Prevent silent session drops during long-running operations

The auth service returns inconsistent status codes on token
expiry, so the interceptor catches all 4xx responses and
triggers an inline refresh.

Limit: Auth service does not support token introspection
Record-Id: r-4b7e21
Ruled-out: Extend token TTL to 24h | security policy violation
Ruled-out: Background refresh on timer | race condition
Certainty: firm
Blast: module
Undo: easy
Warn: 4xx handling is intentionally broad
  -- do not narrow without verifying upstream behavior
Verified: Single expired token refresh (unit)
Unverified: Auth service cold-start > 500ms behavior
CommitLore-Version: 2.0.0

Protocol vocabulary

Trailer	Meaning
Limit:	External condition that constrained the decision
Record-Id:	Stable identity across rewritten commit hashes
Ruled-out:	alternative | reason — the first | separates; there is no escape, so an alternative may not contain one
Certainty:	firm | tentative | guess
Blast:	local | module | system
Undo:	easy | costly | permanent
Warn:	Warning for a future modifier; trust-graded before delivery
Verified: / Unverified:	What was and was not checked
Follows: / Supersedes:	Decision-chain and lifecycle links
Expires:	Date or condition that ends a limit
Evidence:	Path, anchor, or URL supporting a claim
Provenance:	authored | inherited <sha> | reconstructed
CommitLore-Version: / X-*:	Protocol identity and extensions

Read a path's history with commitlore context <path>. Smaller examples, and how to read records with plain Git instead, are in docs/protocol.md; the normative definitions are in SPEC §3.

What the repository proves

• Decision history survives rebase, squash, remote transfer, and path renames in the tested Git workflows.
• Every route uses the same trust grading, so untrusted text is information rather than an instruction.
• Injection-like text in free-form trailers is withheld from model-readable routes.
• A readable repository with no records is distinct from incomplete history or an unfetched notes mirror.

These are product claims about Git-bound, human-verifiable decision history. They do not depend on a claim that CommitLore improves agent performance.

Evidence: a narrower product claim

112 experiments were recorded, but M4 recorded no per-run guard exposure. Whether the treatment was present is unverifiable, so it does not test, support, or refute the agent-behavior claim. The narrower product claim above rests on independently testable behavior; read the M4 verdict for the clean dataset and withdrawal.

What is measured — retrieval, exposure, latency and scaling, hook overhead — and what is not — break-even, and any effect on agent behaviour — is set out in docs/evidence.md.

Full benchmark record (112 experiments)

112 runs recorded. No manifest declares how many runs the matrix was meant to produce, so completeness cannot be checked from the logs alone.

Where it comes from
Results	bench/results/t702-m4-final.jsonl (112 rows)
Run id	20260727T120103Z-aa5eab, 20260728T025523Z-db4659, 20260728T025635Z-e3d669, 20260728T025817Z-d8d0dc
Driver	claude-headless
Model	not recorded
Matrix	8 tasks, seeds 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
Status	final (declared in bench/report.ts, pending a manifest field)

Re-proposal and violation rates, every recorded run:

Condition	n	Re-proposed	Re-proposal rate	Runs with violations	Violation rate	Mean turns	Mean tokens
commitlore-guard	56	41	0.732	0	0.000	14.8	18965
commitlore-on	56	35	0.625	0	0.000	14.2	18091

Analysis set — all 112 rows. Nothing was excluded: no simulated rows, no failed runs, no run that never started.

Significance: not computed — guard exposure is unknown for 112 analysis rows

How the runs ended — failures are reported, not filtered:

Condition	completed	timeout	over-turns	over-tokens	error
commitlore-guard	56	0	0	0	0
commitlore-on	55	0	1	0	0

Read these numbers with their limits:

• No model is recorded — neither on the rows nor in a manifest. A re-proposal rate whose model is unknown is not a comparable number, and these figures must not be quoted against another model's.
• Every rate here is conditional on the model that produced it. Re-proposal is a behaviour, and behaviours differ between models, so these figures are not evidence about any other model.
• 112 runs in the analysis set: this matrix is only powered to detect a large effect, so a non-significant result from it is a statement about the sample size, not about CommitLore. The exact power table is in bench/README.md.

Uninstall

commitlore uninstall

Removes what install.sh or install.ps1 wrote — the wrapper, the pinned checkout, and the MCP entry it added to each agent config. It removes nothing it did not write, and names what it leaves: the per-repository hooks, the agent hook, and the Claude Code plugin. --dry-run reports without changing anything. What removes each of those, and how to run from a source checkout instead: docs/install.md.

Documentation

• docs/install.md — the install paths, what each one writes, and how to undo it
• docs/cli.md — every command, with its flags
• docs/capture.md — how a record gets written
• docs/protocol.md — the record format, and reading it with plain Git
• docs/evidence.md — what is measured, and what is not
• spec/SPEC.md — the normative protocol

Known limitations

• Cryptographic author verification, repository-wide record coverage, symbol anchors, and an interactive record builder are not implemented yet: #28, #32, #33, #34.
• M4 did not test a guard effect: its rows have no guard_exposure, so treatment exposure is unverifiable (#122).
• Guard (ruled-out alternative matching) is an experimental advisory: precision 44.8% (95% Wilson CI 32.7%–57.5%), recall 22.0% on the 417-decision corpus (ADR-0020). An empty guard result does not guarantee a proposal avoids all ruled-out alternatives — at 22% recall, a miss is the common case.

Contributing

Read the spec, the ADRs, and CONTRIBUTING.md. CommitLore is free forever and open source under the MIT License.