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When to Use Lore

Good Fit

You work with coding agents regularly and notice them rediscovering the same things.

  • You've explained your project's auth quirks, deployment process, or API patterns to the agent more than once
  • You have a growing project where context matters — service relationships, config conventions, infrastructure details
  • You want the agent to get better over time without manual prompt engineering

You use multiple repos or services that share context.

  • The agent needs to know about your infrastructure, CI setup, or cross-repo relationships
  • You link work repos to a central Lore instance so every project benefits from shared knowledge

You want structured work tracking inside the agent's workflow.

  • Roadmaps and plans that survive session boundaries
  • The agent sees active work items at startup and picks up where it left off

Poor Fit

Your projects are short-lived or disposable.

  • One-off scripts, throwaway prototypes, hackathon projects — the knowledge capture overhead isn't worth it when there's no "next session" to benefit from

You don't use coding agents.

  • Lore is specifically for AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode). It has no value without one.

You need team-wide real-time collaboration.

  • Lore is single-agent, single-user. Team workflows use git (branches, PRs, merges). There's no live sync, no conflict resolution beyond git, no multi-user access control.

Your environment prohibits local file writes.

  • Lore stores everything as files in your git repo and won't work in read-only or sandboxed environments.

Team Workflows

See Cross-Repo Workflow for team topology options.

Comparison With Alternatives

Approach Persistent? Structured? Agent-integrated?
MEMORY.md (platform built-in) Partial — platforms overwrite between sessions No — free-form text blob Yes
CLAUDE.md / .cursorrules Yes — git-tracked Minimal — single file Yes
Custom system prompts Yes — but manual maintenance Your structure Depends on platform
Lore Yes — git-tracked, multi-file Yes — skills, agents, docs, conventions Yes — harness hooks reinforce capture

Lore's main value over simpler approaches is harness-level structure. A CLAUDE.md file works fine at 50 lines. At 500 lines the file becomes a wall of text the agent skims past. Lore routes knowledge to the right location (skill, doc, convention, runbook) and loads it on demand instead of dumping everything into every session. For measured cost data, see Cost Evidence.

Migration

From CLAUDE.md / .cursorrules

  1. Install Lore: npx create-lore my-project
  2. Move project-specific rules to docs/context/agent-rules.md
  3. Move coding conventions to docs/context/conventions/
  4. Move gotchas and tricks to skills via /lore-create-skill
  5. Move environment details (URLs, services, relationships) to docs/knowledge/environment/
  6. Delete the old file — Lore generates CLAUDE.md from .lore/instructions.md

From Scratch Notes / No System

  1. Install Lore: npx create-lore my-project
  2. Work normally. Hooks will nudge the agent to capture knowledge as it discovers things.
  3. Run /lore-capture after substantive sessions to ensure nothing was missed.
  4. Knowledge accumulates naturally. Review docs/ periodically to prune noise.

Uninstalling

Lore is plain files. Delete the Lore directories and you're back to a normal project:

rm -rf .lore .claude .cursor .opencode hooks lib scripts
rm CLAUDE.md opencode.json mkdocs.yml .lore-config

Your docs/ directory contains your accumulated knowledge — keep it or delete it. Nothing external to clean up. No accounts, no services, no subscriptions.