What it is

kadence is an open-source CLI that keeps a team's tasks, decisions, and notes in your git repository as append-only event files. Your teammates and your coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) read the same record, so the next session starts from what was already decided instead of asking again.

Why

Coding agents forget everything between sessions. The usual fixes are a CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md that grows until nobody reads it, or a hosted memory service. kadence keeps the history next to the code: it is committed with it, reviewed in pull requests, and comes back with git checkout.

What you get

• Tasks with acceptance criteria, claims, and a board, in the terminal or a terminal UI

• Decisions with the reason and the options that were rejected, so nobody proposes them again

• Notes and documentation in the same journal

• kadence search across tasks, decisions, notes and docs; it says so when the journal has no answer

• kadence prime: what a new agent session needs to know, in under 40 lines

• A Claude Code hook that puts the matching records next to each prompt

• --json on every command, with a published schema agents can rely on

How it works

Every change is a new small JSON file in .kadence/events. Git merges them without conflicts, and the current state is rebuilt from the events, so the same events always produce the same board. No server, no account, no network, no telemetry.

Measured, with the limits stated

• Told in CLAUDE.md to search first; 0 of 10 agents did. With the records placed in the prompt, 9 of 10 used the journal. (10 questions, one repository, Claude Sonnet.)

• One task's full history costs an agent 982 bytes, whether the project has 10 tasks or 1,000.

• Across 8,396 merges in 130 public repositories, task files conflicted in about 1 merge in 200. An append-only journal removes that class of conflict by design.

Get started

npm install -g kadence

kadence init

Node 20 or newer, macOS and Linux (Windows is not tested yet). MIT, free.

Status

It is early: nobody outside its own repository uses it yet. If your team hands work between people and agent sessions, I would like to hear how that goes today: github.com/bogutskiandriy/kadence/issues