JAAvila-Of/vivac

*So that months later something can still answer “why are we here?”*
**What you get** · **See it** · **Install** · **First five minutes** · **Why one map** · **Bring a project in**
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Built for one person's own work
I run eight projects in parallel — open source, work and my own — and five
of them are large. Every time I came back to one I had to piece together what
had been decided in it, and more than once I watched the agent change
something we had already settled, because both of us had forgotten we had.
What I had against that was manual: ending each stretch of work by asking
the model for *a safepoint, so we can pick this up later*, or keeping a
where_are_we.txt at the root of the project.
vivac is what replaced them, and it is still measured on those projects. That
is the whole of its pedigree, and it shows in what got built: every mechanism
here came out of a defect that had already cost me days, and every number on
this page came off a real tree rather than a benchmark written to make a
README look good.
The tree this project keeps of itself, 23 days in: **695 nodes, 315 of them
closed, 176 standing decisions, 16 levels deep.**
Three of those defects, and what each one turned into:
- **A run marked DONE with its findings still open** — and 26 days before
anybody noticed. Now vivac done refuses, and says what is missing.
- **A reading list of 109 open fronts across 224 lines**, with the one
touched yesterday at the bottom. Now open answers *what is waiting on
you*, in that order, and stops at ten.
- **Three claims shipped to crates.io that the binary beside them
contradicted.** Now a test runs every command this page shows and holds its
lists against --help.
What I would not give up now is no single feature. It is looking at the tree
of what was decided and why; picking a project back up with whichever model
is at hand and having it know what the last one settled; and knowing where
the work stands at any moment. In my experience that is worth more than
anything else here, and I hope it serves you as well.
Issues are open, and I want to hear where it fails you. Pull requests are not
open yet; CONTRIBUTING.md says why.
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The problem
When you develop with an agentic AI, work spawns more work. Three hops in, you
have lost the thread of what you originally set out to do.
It is not a memory problem: usually everything is written down. **It is a
provenance problem.** What is written does not say what it was born *from*,
and without that edge there is no way to reconstruct why you are where you
are.
> Measured on a real compiler: the path between the goal and the day's work
> was **six levels deep**, spread across a chronologically ordered 8,853-line
> tracker, 52 planning documents and 21 issues. The structure was temporal,
> which is exactly the opposite of provenance.
Logbooks, decision records, issue trackers and session memory for agents all
store the **node**. Where one of them stores the **edge** as well, it is a link
somebody has to remember to add — so it is missing on exactly the node where
nobody thought it would matter. Where it sits goes through
them category by category, and says where each one is better than this.
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What you get
**The agent starts oriented, and nobody has to ask it to.** A hook runs
vivac session start when a session opens, so the first thing in its context
is where you are, what has already been decided, and what not to touch:
sh
cargo install vivac
sh
vivac init
vivac setup claude-code
sh
vivac push "Replace the cache adapter" --why "the session bug traces back to it"
vivac push "No test for expiry" --why "no way to reproduce it" --blocks
vivac pop "reproduced: sessions expire at 300s, not 3600"