Lore – give your coding agent the decisions your team made

Lore, built on the open-source RAC engine, provides a deterministic, read-only system of record for coding agents by storing team decisions as typed Markdown in the repo. It serves exact, current decisions to Claude Code, Cursor, and Claude Desktop via MCP, rejecting superseded ones, and enforces knowledge integrity through CI validation. Unlike RAG or agent memory, Lore offers reproducible retrieval and air-gapped operation without LLM calls.

Quickstart quickstart · How it compares how-it-compares · How it works how-it-works · Docs https://itsthelore.github.io/rac-core/ · CLI https://itsthelore.github.io/rac-core/cli/ · Changelog https://github.com/itsthelore/rac-core/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md 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what's near a loose question; Lore is good at returning the exact, current decision and declining the ones you've superseded.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 and rac 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 with rac telemetry off --enterprise security posture /itsthelore/rac-core/blob/main/docs/security.md , 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 https://itsthelore.github.io/rac-core/cli/ export . The connectors themselves live in the separate lore-connectors companion. The engine is a library too; its public surface is rac. all . python 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 ADRs and want those decisions to actually shape what the agent does. Anyone who wants the why behind their software versioned alongside the code. Full documentation: https://itsthelore.github.io/rac-core/ Quickstart https://itsthelore.github.io/rac-core/quickstart/ — install and author your first artifact MCP server https://itsthelore.github.io/rac-core/mcp/ — tools, client configuration, examples CLI reference https://itsthelore.github.io/rac-core/cli/ — 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 https://github.com/itsthelore/wayfinder-router , 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 https://github.com/itsthelore/rac-core/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md .