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selvedge

selvedge

Long-term memory for AI-coded codebases.

A local MCP server. AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) call it as they work to log the why behind every change — captured live, in the same context that produced it. Stays in a SQLite file under .selvedge/ next to your code.

pip install selvedge
Quickstart GitHub Why Selvedge?

The problem

Section titled “The problem”

Six months ago, your AI agent added a column called user_tier_v2. You don’t know why. git blame points to a commit from claude-code with a generated message that says “Update schema.” The session that made the change is long gone — and so is the prompt that produced it.

With Selvedge, you run this instead:

Terminal window
$ selvedge blame user_tier_v2


  user_tier_v2
  Changed     2025-10-14 09:31:02
  Agent       claude-code
  Commit      3e7a991
  Reasoning   User asked to add a grandfathering flag for legacy free-tier
              users during the pricing migration. Stores the original tier
              so we can backfill discounts without touching billing history.

That reasoning was captured by the agent in the moment — written into Selvedge from the same context that produced the change. Not inferred from the diff afterward by a second LLM. Not a hand-typed commit message.

What Selvedge does, in three lines

Section titled “What Selvedge does, in three lines”

Captures the why, live

AI agents call Selvedge’s MCP tools while they work — log_change records what they changed and why, in the same context window that produced the change.

Tracks entities, not lines

Attribution is at the thing you actually search for: users.email, env/STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, api/v1/checkout, deps/stripe. Prefix queries work everywhere.

Stays local, stays simple

Zero deps beyond MCP + Click + Rich. SQLite under .selvedge/ next to your code. No accounts, no servers, no telemetry.

Quickstart

Section titled “Quickstart”

Three commands. The third one is interactive — it detects which AI tools are on your machine (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) and wires Selvedge into each one’s config. Every modified file gets a .bak written before any change reaches disk.

Terminal window
pip install selvedge
cd your-project
selvedge setup

That’s it. Open a second terminal and run selvedge watch to live-tail events as your agent makes them. Then start asking your codebase questions:

Terminal window
selvedge blame payments.amount         # what changed last and why
selvedge diff users --since 30d        # all changes to users in 30 days
selvedge changeset add-stripe-billing  # all events for a feature
selvedge search "stripe"               # full-text search

Full quickstart →  ·  CLI reference →  ·  MCP tool reference →

Who it’s for

Section titled “Who it’s for”

Teams running long-term, AI-coded codebases. When the project is big enough that someone will touch it again in twelve months, three years — but most of it was written by an agent whose context evaporated the day each PR shipped. git blame tells you what changed. Selvedge tells you why — even after the agent session, the prompt, the developer who asked for it, and the model version are all long gone.

Solo developers using Claude Code on everyday projects. Side projects, weekend builds, the small internal tool you keep poking at. You don’t need enterprise governance — you just need to remember why you (or your agent) did the thing you did yesterday, last week, last sprint.

If you’ve ever come back to your own AI-built project and thought “what was this for again?”, Selvedge is the missing piece.

Where Selvedge fits

Section titled “Where Selvedge fits”

AI agents call Selvedge as they work. Selvedge captures the why into a durable, queryable store and emits it back out as Agent Trace records, observability metadata, and compliance artifacts.

Selvedge does not replace git (line-level what/when), PR review tools (review-time quality), agent observability (LLM call traces), or general-purpose code-host AI features. It sits between them — the provenance-as-first-class-citizen layer that everything else references.

See the comparison table →

Listings

Section titled “Listings”

Selvedge is open source (MIT) and lives in four directories beyond GitHub.