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Commonwealth

The shared, agent-readable context every teammate's AI reads before it acts. Instant onboarding. Anti-bus-factor. Plain markdown. Git-backed. Open source.

Commonwealth is a multiplayer, git-backed, agent-readable second brain for teams — a shared repo of plain markdown (memory / decisions / work-state / people) that every teammate's AI reads before acting and writes back to.

Most teams have a personal-notes story (Obsidian, CLAUDE.md) and an enterprise-search story (Glean, Notion AI). Nothing in between owns the reasoning layer of a small team — the why behind decisions, the current work-state, the memory that would otherwise walk out the door with whoever wrote it. Commonwealth is that layer, made multiplayer.

  • Plain markdown, git-backed. Your knowledge is files you own — diffable, portable, no proprietary store to be locked into.
  • Per-project brains. Each project gets its own brain (one git repo). Everyone reads and writes it through their existing AI (Claude Code first).
  • Agent-native. Exposed over MCP, so a teammate's agent reads the brain before acting and writes back what it learns.
  • Conflict-free by design. One fact per file with collision-proof names, so concurrent writers merge instead of clobbering each other.
  • Decisions are traced. What was decided, when, by whom, and why — captured by default.
  • Secrets never sync. Detected and blocked at capture, scrubbed before commit.

Start here

  • :material-rocket-launch: Quickstart Get a brain running for one project in a couple of minutes, from npm.

  • :material-sitemap: Architecture Git-as-substrate, the concurrency model (the crux), and the auto-bridge.

  • :material-file-tree: Data model The markdown/frontmatter schema for the four note kinds.

  • :material-source-branch: Distribution Auto-provisioning into Claude Code; OSS plus monetization.

  • :material-server: Self-host Run the whole thing on infrastructure you control.

  • :material-map-marker-path: Roadmap The phased plan (M0–M5), mapped to GitHub milestones.

Design principles

  1. Git is the substrate. Markdown files are the source of truth; any DB/index is derived and disposable.
  2. Design out concurrency, don't resolve it. Atomic, one-fact-per-file notes with collision-proof ids union-merge with zero conflicts.
  3. Prefer create/supersede over in-place edits. History and reasoning stay visible.
  4. Curation is gated, and review-capable. Auto-captured knowledge passes scope + dedup + secret gates before it reaches canon.

Every significant decision is recorded as an Architecture Decision Record.

Open source under Apache-2.0. Published on npm as @cmnwlth/cli.