Quickstart · How it compares · How it works · Docs · CLI · Changelog
Give your coding agent the decisions your team already made — so it stops re-doing things you ruled out.
Lore keeps your team's recorded knowledge — requirements, decisions, designs, roadmaps, and prompts — as typed Markdown in your repo and serves it read-only to Claude Code, Cursor, and Claude Desktop over MCP, so the agent cites your decisions instead of violating them. No RAG, no embeddings, no model call to decide what's relevant — retrieval is deterministic and reproducible. It is built on RAC — Requirements as Code, the open-source engine underneath; the package, CLI, and MCP server ship under the rac
name.
Lore isn't a search index or a memory tool — it's the deterministic system of record an agent grounds against. Fuzzy retrieval (RAG, agent memory) is good at finding what's near a loose question; Lore is good at returning the exact, current decision and declining the ones you've superseded. They compose well — recall fuzzily, then verify in Lore.
| Lore | Fuzzy retrieval (RAG / agent memory) | |
|---|---|---|
| Good at | the exact, current decision | finding what's near a question |
| Retrieval | deterministic, reproducible | similarity-ranked, varies by run |
| Role | source of truth, read-only | a fast index or working copy |
| In CI | enforced (rac validate / rac gate ) |
|
| not its job |
Install the engine:
pip install rac-core
Scaffold identity and your first artifact:
rac quickstart
Connect your agent(Claude Code, from your repo root):
claude mcp add lore -- rac mcp
Enforce in CI so bad knowledge never lands:
rac validate rac/ && rac gate rac/
| Command | Gets you |
|---|---|
pip install rac-core |
|
the rac CLI + the lore MCP server |
|
pip install 'rac-core[ingest]' |
- DOCX / HTML import |
pip install 'rac-core[ingest-all]'| - PDF / PPTX / XLSX import |
pip install 'rac-core[explorer]'| - the terminal Explorer (
rac explorer) |
Requires Python 3.11+. uv tool install rac-core
also works.
Typed Markdown, in your repo. Every artifact is plain Markdown with a tiny frontmatter envelope; the engine classifies it deterministically and validates it against a per-type schema.Read-only at serve time. The MCP server only ever reads; the trust boundary is human PR review, and the agent cannot mutate the store.Enforced at write time.rac validate
andrac gate
reject malformed artifacts, broken or ambiguous links, and references to superseded decisions — in CI, before the knowledge lands.Air-gapped by design. The engine makes no LLM calls and no network calls; the only egress is a consent-gated, content-free usage ping that is off by default, and regulated installs can prove it stays off withrac telemetry off --enterprise
(security posture, ADR-086).
Claude Code (from your repo root):
claude mcp add lore -- rac mcp
Claude Desktop / Cursor (mcpServers
in the client config):
{
"mcpServers": {
"lore": { "command": "rac", "args": ["mcp", "--root", "/absolute/path/to/your/repo"] }
}
}
rac quickstart # set up identity + scaffold your first artifact
rac new decision adr.md # scaffold a typed artifact (mints the id)
rac validate rac/ # check every artifact in a directory
rac inspect requirement.md # see its type and completeness
rac review rac/ # full repository review, worst problems first
rac gate rac/ # the merge gate: validate + relationships + review
Already have decisions in Confluence, Notion, or loose Markdown? The rac-import
agent skill turns one existing document into one valid artifact, with a human-review step before anything is written:
rac skill install rac-import
Then ask your agent, in plain language: "import this decision doc into Lore." It
drafts from only what your document says, shows you the proposed type, title,
and relationships to confirm, scaffolds with rac new
, and closes on
rac validate
. For multi-format or bulk conversion, use the rac-ingest
skill.
rac export rac/ --html --out lore.html # the Portal: the whole graph, one file
rac export rac/ --okf # a conformant Open Knowledge Format bundle
rac export rac/ --documents # JSONL for memory/RAG backends
rac export rac/ --graph # the typed decision graph for graph backends
The --documents
and --graph
modes feed external memory, RAG, and graph tools
so an agent can recall fuzzily there and then verify in Lore — see the
CLI reference. The connectors
themselves live in the separate lore-connectors
companion.
The engine is a library too; its public surface is rac.__all__
.
from rac import parse_file, classify, find_artifacts
art = parse_file("rac/decisions/adr-001-markdown-first.md")
print(classify(art).type) # -> "decision"
result = find_artifacts("rac/", "caching") # returns a SearchResult
for hit in result.matches:
print(hit.id, hit.title)
Google's Open Knowledge Format (OKF) standardises the carrier — a Git tree of
Markdown with YAML front matter — and is deliberately permissive. RAC writes that
same carrier and adds what OKF leaves to the consumer: write-time enforcement
in CI. rac validate
and rac relationships --validate
reject malformed
artifacts, broken links, and references to superseded decisions, deterministically,
before the knowledge lands. rac export --okf
turns any RAC repo into a conformant OKF bundle — so the two compose rather than compete.
Teams running coding agents heavily(Claude Code, Cursor) tired of the agent ignoring decisions the team already made.** Teams who already write ADRsand want those decisions to actually shape what the agent does. Anyone who wants the**whybehind their software versioned alongside the code.
Full documentation: https://itsthelore.github.io/rac-core/
Quickstart— install and author your first artifactMCP server— tools, client configuration, examplesCLI reference— every command, flag, and exit code
Lore is the product surface of RAC — Requirements as Code, the open-source
engine underneath; the package, CLI, and MCP server ship under the rac
name, and
lore
is the server identity and brand.
Wayfinder, the deterministic
prompt-complexity router, began as a route
experiment inside RAC and was split into its own tool — routing is a runtime concern, not a knowledge one.
rac-core/
src/rac/ the engine: CLI, core, services, output, the in-process MCP
server (rac mcp), and bundled skills, templates, and git hooks
rac/ the dogfood corpus — requirements, decisions, designs, roadmaps,
and prompts that govern the project itself
tests/ per-service batteries plus core / cli / artifacts coverage (ADR-027)
docs/ the documentation site (MkDocs)
examples/ the grounding demo, woven into the corpus and the test fixtures
rac-localview/ the Portal / graph viewer, vendored into the engine
pip install -e .[dev]
python -m pytest
ruff check
, ruff format --check
, and mypy src/
run in CI alongside the per-service batteries (ADR-027).
Lore is early and evolving quickly. The MCP server ships today. Contributions, ideas, and experiments welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md.