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Rule files don't travel
CLAUDE.md and Cursor rules are per-tool, per-repo, and injected
into every session. Ten people's conventions become fifty standing
instructions no agent can use well.
Use case · teams & onboarding
Stop re-explaining your team's decisions to every new hire — and every agent.
Your team's hardest-won asset is its institutional memory — the decisions, the conventions, the “why we don't do it that way” — and it lives in a few people's heads, leaking out one Slack reply at a time. PriorStates is the layer where that knowledge accumulates once and is recalled by everyone: across teammates via sync, and across every AI tool via one shared store. Onboard a new person — or a new agent — with a pack, not a week of asking around.
Individual memory is solved. Team memory isn't.
A local store fixes one person's recall. The valuable, hard version — shared recall across people and tools — has no good home today.
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Wikis rot and aren't recalled
A wiki page is written once, never searched mid-task by an agent, and drifts out of date. The knowledge that matters is oral and bursty — and it evaporates.
How a team's memory compounds, in five moves
The individual loop — recall, record — but the record is shared, so one person's lesson becomes everyone's starting point.
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1
Someone learns it
A teammate makes a decision, hits a gotcha, or rules out an approach — the dense, hard-won knowledge that usually stays in their head.
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2
Record it once
One
journal_add/memory_addin whatever tool they're using. No separate wiki to update, no context-switch. -
3
Sync to the team
priorstates syncconverges the shared store across everyone's machines — the same store the team's ChatGPT connector reads. -
4
Everyone recalls it
The next teammate — in Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, anywhere — recalls it the moment it's relevant. Decided once, known by all.
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5
Onboard with a pack
Export the team's decisions as a checksummed
.pspack. A new hire imports it and their first session is already warm.
A new hire's first session, warm
Day one, before anyone explains anything. Same question, before and after the onboarding pack.
Before — a blank slate. The new engineer's agent knows nothing about how your team works:
$ memory_search "auth, deploys, conventions"
(no results — fresh machine, empty store)So it guesses — confidently, and often wrong — and the new hire spends a week asking around to fill the gaps.
After — one pack import.
priorstates import onboarding.pspack, and the same search returns the
team's hard-won rules:
$ memory_search "auth, deploys, conventions"
decision Auth is validated in the gateway, never in services
decision Ship to staging before main — always
gotcha Billing service clock is UTC; everything else is local
loser Evaluated a monorepo in Q1 — rejected, here's whyHours of “why is it like this?” collapse into a recall — and as the new hire learns more, they record it back and the next hire starts further ahead.
Four kinds of team knowledge worth keeping
Each a plain Markdown file with provenance — who recorded it, when, and the evidence — semantically searchable by everyone.
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Decision
A standing choice the team made. “Staging before main — always.” Stops every new session from re-litigating it.
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Gotcha
A trap that bit someone once. “Billing's clock is UTC.” The new hire avoids it without first falling in.
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Loser
An approach already evaluated and rejected. “The monorepo, Q1.” So it isn't re-proposed every six months.
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Reference
Where the truth lives. “On-call runbook, escalation path.” Pointers the whole team recalls on demand.
Shared — but scoped, not dumped
A ten-team bucket recalls worse as it grows. The primitives keep each team's knowledge dense and let it cross boundaries on purpose.
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Areas
Scope memory by team or subsystem so recall stays dense — research notes don't dilute an ops query. One workspace per area.
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Packs
Export a scope as a checksummed, provenance-stamped .pspack.
Crossing a boundary is an explicit export → review → import, not a bleed.
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Sync
The shared store converges across machines. Imports don't auto-pin, so one team's “always” never silently becomes everyone's standing instruction.
You don't run any of this by hand
Once installed, your team's agents do it on their own.
priorstates init gives a repo or area its own
memory and journal and
wires the recall / record protocol into Claude Code,
Codex, Gemini, Copilot and Cursor. priorstates sync shares it across the
team; priorstates export turns a scope into an onboarding pack. Secrets
never go in memory — those belong in a vault.
Give your team a memory.
Free, open source, and yours to run.