Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs — leave a trail your future self and your agents can follow back.

A portable, repo-local, human-readable ledger of durable project state for human–agent software work (the Project Continuity Memory capability).

North-star. Project Continuity Memory is a repo-local, human-readable ledger of durable project state: what was decided, what failed, what is active, what is risky, what is unresolved, and what the next agent or human must know before acting. It is not a transcript archive, not a vector database, and not a replacement for source code, tests, current human instruction, or authoritative docs.

It stores durable project state as typed, human-readable records inside a target project's .project-memory/ directory, so humans and agents can resume work across sessions, tools, devices, branches, and time without re-discovering decisions, repeating failed attempts, or trusting stale context.

• PyPI package name: crumb-kit (pip install crumb-kit)
• Import package / GitHub repo: breadcrumbs
• CLI binary name: crumb
• Formal capability name: Project Continuity Memory

Non-goals

This tool deliberately does not:

1. Build a vector database as the source of truth (vectors are a later, disposable search accelerator).
2. Store full chat transcripts as memory (it extracts durable decisions, attempts, handoffs, questions, traps, and evidence).
3. Rely on one vendor's memory feature (Claude, Codex, Cursor, Gemini, and future agents all read the same plain records).
4. Require MCP, hooks, or a daemon for baseline functionality (plain files + CLI work first).
5. Use AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md / Cursor / Gemini rules as the memory database (they hold a signpost, plus the few rules you explicitly crumb promote into CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md).
6. Store secrets, credentials, customer PII, or sensitive local notes in committed project memory.
7. Make capture so heavy that humans stop using it (routine capture targets under 90 seconds).

Install

breadcrumbs is a stdlib-only Python package (no third-party runtime dependencies) that installs a single crumb binary. The recommended path is pipx, which puts the CLI on your PATH in its own isolated environment:

pipx install crumb-kit   # from PyPI
pipx install .           # from a source checkout (this repo dir)

Plain pip works too (prefer a virtualenv):

python -m pip install .              # or: pip install <built-wheel>.whl

After install, the binary is on PATH and the .project-memory/ template tree ships inside the package (breadcrumbs/templates/), so init finds it wherever the package lives — there is no repo-relative path dependency:

crumb --version                 # breadcrumbs X.Y.Z (record schema_version N)
crumb init                      # locates bundled templates post-install

Versioning. The package uses semantic versioning. crumb --version prints the package version and the record schema_version (the manifest's schema_version:, currently 4). These are independent: the package version moves with the code; the record schema version moves only on a breaking change to the on-disk record format, and a package MAJOR bump accompanies it.

Requires Python ≥ 3.9.

No npx (deliberate)

There is intentionally no npx/Node distribution. The tool is Python and ships via pipx/pip. JavaScript-ecosystem reach (an npx crumb wrapper) is a separately-justified future decision, not a default migration — it would only be added if dogfooding shows a concrete need, and would wrap the same Python core rather than reimplement it.

Quickstart

Two invocation forms. Once installed (above), run crumb <command>. From a source checkout without installing, the equivalent is python crumb.py <command> (a thin shim over breadcrumbs.cli); the per-command examples below use that source form. They are interchangeable.

crumb init                       # install .project-memory/ + manifest + .gitignore rules
crumb init --with-adapter --with-mcp --with-hooks   # ...and wire it into your agent (see Integrations)
crumb validate                   # deterministically check the store (schema + invariants)
crumb schema                     # print the record contract (sections, vocab, rules)
crumb remember decision          # capture a durable choice
crumb verify "finding#1" --status fixed   # record a verification result (a finding about reality)
crumb mark-status "dec_…" stale --reason "superseded by reality"   # record lifecycle mutation
crumb mark-status "trap_…" stale --reason "fixed in 2.1"           # ...retire a trap the same way
crumb mark-status "q_…" answered --reason "see dec_…"              # ...and answer an open question
crumb show "dec_…"               # the full text behind any id the tool prints (+ "see also")
crumb note question|trap|idea    # leave a note for the next agent (no hand-editing)
crumb jot "flaky under -n auto"  # short-term note: a TTL, no evidence rule
crumb inbox                      # triage the jots; promote the durable ones
crumb migrate                    # bring an older store up to this build's schema
crumb usage --never              # which records nothing has ever surfaced
crumb usage --decay              # old records nothing surfaced in 180 days (prints mark-status commands)
crumb retitle "ses_…" "what that session was really about"   # fix a title that says nothing
crumb traps --stale              # traps nobody has confirmed lately, and what they cost
crumb expired                    # records past their expires_at (still on disk, out of the packet)
crumb questions --aging          # open questions older than the question TTL
crumb verify --recheck "ver_…"   # rerun a verification's commands; record the result (asks first)
crumb consolidate                # clusters of near-duplicate records; --merge them into one
crumb rollup sessions --before 2026-09-01   # fold old machine session snapshots into one record
crumb prune handoffs --dry-run   # branch handoffs whose branch is gone and which are 30+ days old
crumb promote "dec_…"            # make a proven record a standing rule in CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md
crumb demote "dec_…"             # ...and take it back out (the record stays)
crumb capture session            # record session end (git-prefilled); updates handoff + current
crumb resume                     # print a bounded resume packet with computed staleness
crumb reindex                    # rebuild generated/ projections (mutations reindex automatically)
crumb search "auth middleware"   # deterministic keyword/tag/file lookup over records
crumb search "login" --explain   # ...and show the stems the query became
crumb guard "rewrite the auth middleware"   # warn before repeating a known mistake
crumb audit                      # heuristic health/safety report (stale/unsafe/bloated)
crumb scan-secrets               # block if committed memory holds token-like strings
crumb doctor                     # is memory actually wired into your agent?
crumb doctor --hook-log          # what each hook did: firings, outcomes, timings
crumb mcp serve | register | doctor   # run / register / health-check the optional MCP server

In this build, init, validate, remember, capture session, resume, search, guard, audit, and scan-secrets are all implemented — the full MVP (capture → resume → trust). resume closes the capture → resume value loop (MVP-core); guard adds the "don't repeat the expensive mistake" capability that separates a continuity engine from a scrapbook; and audit + scan-secrets complete MVP-trust — the heuristic safety net (secrets, instruction-like text, generated-packet drift, staleness, bloat) that lets you trust the memory, not just use it.

crumb init

python crumb.py init                                   # prompt for session policy (default: full)
python crumb.py init --session-tracking distillate     # keep sessions/ local
python crumb.py init --no-commit-generated             # keep generated/*.md local
python crumb.py init --project /path/to/repo --json    # init elsewhere, JSON summary
python crumb.py init --force                           # replace an existing scaffold (DELETES all records)

init copies the .project-memory/ template tree into the target project, writes manifest.yml (recording the chosen tracking policies), and inserts a managed block into the project .gitignore. It runs on non-git folders too, printing a notice that git-derived record fields will use defined sentinels.

On a terminal, init also offers to wire the store into your agent (inject a signpost into CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, register the MCP server, install hooks). Default non-interactive init touches none of those and prints a one-line nudge. See Integrations below; flags: --with-adapter/--with-mcp/--with-hooks (and --no-*), --print-integrations (dry run), --remove-integrations.

Running init with any integration flag against a project that already has a .project-memory/ store applies just those integrations and leaves the store untouched — no --force needed (and none should be used: --force replaces the scaffold and deletes all existing records).

crumb validate

python crumb.py validate                      # human-readable report; exit 1 on problems
python crumb.py validate --json               # structured findings + exit code
python crumb.py validate --verbose            # also list the passing checks
python crumb.py validate --project /path/repo # validate elsewhere

validate is fully deterministic — it checks structural invariants only (manifest version, core files, record frontmatter, filename-canonical identity, status/privacy vocabularies, evidence/handoff/session requirements, generated markers). It performs no heuristic content scanning; secret and instruction-like-text detection live in audit / scan-secrets. Exit codes: 0 clean, 1 problems found, 2 no .project-memory/ store present.

Every command speaks the same two dialects. On failure, the first line of the message is CRUMB-ERROR: <subcommand>: … — a fixed, greppable token, so a run piped through head/tail still says it failed even when $? belongs to the pipe rather than to crumb. Under --json, every command returns ok, command and items (aliasing whichever list that command emits — findings, hits, matches, …, all still present under their own names), so one reader works across subcommands instead of a per-subcommand adapter that reports zero problems when it guesses the key wrong.

crumb remember decision | attempt

# non-interactive (agent-friendly): title + sections + evidence as flags
python crumb.py remember decision \
  --title "Use repo-local Markdown as source of truth" \
  --set Context "needed a tool-independent store" \
  --set Decision "Markdown + YAML frontmatter" \
  --evidence commit abc1234 --evidence command "npm test" \
  --tags memory,architecture

python crumb.py remember attempt --title "Tried a sqlite store" \
  --set Result "too heavy for the value" --confidence low

Frontmatter is auto-derived (clock + git) and defaulted; you supply only a title and a few section lines (--set HEADING TEXT, repeatable). Run with no --title in a terminal for an interactive prompt. A decision/attempt must carry evidence or --confidence low (validate §16.9) — the command enforces this and refuses to write an invalid record. --json emits a machine summary.

remember attempt also accepts the fixed attempt vocabulary as named flags (--problem, --tried, --result, --why, --do-not-retry, --related), so the contract is visible in --help instead of discoverable only by rejection.

Titles can be as long as you like; filenames can't. The slug in .project-memory/<type>/<date>-<slug>.md is capped at 60 characters (cut on a word boundary, -2/-3 collision suffixes included in the budget), so a sentence-length title never produces a sentence-length path. That keeps a store clonable on Windows, where the whole path is capped at 260 characters unless core.longpaths is on, and stops long titles from tripping Linux's 255-byte per-name limit. The full text stays in the record's title frontmatter, so nothing is lost. Records already on disk with longer names keep working — the cap applies when a name is generated, never when one is read.

A near-duplicate is refused. remember, note, verify and jot compare a new record with the live records of its type (shared specific words, files and tags). One that nearly repeats an existing record is not written: the command exits 3 with CRUMB-ERROR: … looks like <id> (0.71 similar) — pass --supersedes <id> to replace it, or --allow-duplicate to write anyway. --supersedes <id> writes the new record and marks the old one superseded by it; --allow-duplicate keeps both (a jot takes only --allow-duplicate). The MCP writers take the same two options. crumb audit reports near-duplicates already in the store.

The record's agent frontmatter says who wrote it. Without --agent, the CLI reads the environment (CLAUDECODE, CURSOR_AGENT, CODEX_SANDBOX, …) and records the harness it finds, or unknown when it finds none — it will not claim a human wrote a record just because the flag was missing. Pass --agent human to make that claim explicitly.

crumb verify

python crumb.py verify "perf-audit-2026-05-15#F1" \
  --status fixed --method static \
  --evidence file app/DoWhatApplication.kt:170 \
  --note "DB validation moved to applicationScope.launch(ioDispatcher)"

Records a verification result — "I checked X; here is its state" — the most common agentic output in maintenance, audits, and "is this bug still real?" work. Without a home for it, agents either drop it or mis-file it as a decision/attempt and pollute those categories. --status is the outcome (fixed|open|regressed|not_applicable|inconclusive); --method is static|runtime|test. Like a decision/attempt it needs evidence or --confidence low. Verifications surface in the resume packet's Verifications section (actionable outcomes first) and are searchable with crumb search --type verification --status open (here --status filters on the outcome). Mirrored over MCP as memory_verify.

A fixed or not_applicable result expires after 90 days (ttl_verification_days): it leaves the packet's list and guard's live set, and stays searchable. An actionable one never expires; after 90 days the packet asks for a recheck. crumb verify --recheck <id> (repeatable) or --all reruns the recorded command/test evidence in the project root and writes the result as a new verification (fixed if every command exited 0, else open, with exit codes and the last output lines in its notes) that supersedes the old one. It prints each command and asks first; --yes skips the question, and without a terminal it refuses (exit 2) unless --yes is given. There is no MCP equivalent.

--scope branch records a result that holds only on the current branch — a test that fails on work in progress, say. On any other branch it leaves the packet and guard's live set; search still finds it.

crumb schema

python crumb.py schema                       # the full record contract (human)
python crumb.py schema attempt --json        # one record type, machine-readable
python crumb.py schema attempt --template    # a copy-pasteable `remember` skeleton
python crumb.py schema trap --template       # ...or a `crumb note trap` one

schema prints the record contract — body sections per type, required/derived frontmatter, status/privacy/confidence vocabularies, and the evidence-or-low- confidence rule — straight from the source constants, with no .project-memory/ required. --template <type> emits a fill-in command so an agent reads the contract once instead of probing --help repeatedly (trap and question templates are crumb note … commands, since that is how both are written).

crumb note question | trap | idea

python crumb.py note question "Should age signals gate compliance?" --why "blocks export"
python crumb.py note trap "gradlew --stop corrupts R.jar lock" --area build --safe "kill by pid"
python crumb.py note idea "cache the resume packet" --set Idea "memoize across sessions"

note is the write-surface for the three record kinds that previously had no command: open questions, known traps, and ideas. question/trap write one validated file each — questions/<slug>.md (id q_<slug>) / traps/<slug>.md (id trap_<slug>) — and open-questions.md / known-traps.md are rebuilt as one-line-per-record indexes of them; on a store still at schema_version 2 they append a parse-verified block to those files instead (crumb migrate moves the blocks into files). idea writes a validated record under ideas/. Each refreshes generated/resume-packet.md so the projection never lags the note. Mirrored over MCP as the memory_note tool.

crumb show

python crumb.py show dec_20260625_repo-local-memory-source-of-truth
python crumb.py show q_should-age-signals-gate-compliance --json

The resume packet and the hook injections carry one line per record; show fetches the rest. It takes any id the tool prints — a decision, attempt, verification, idea, session, jot, trap or question (q:… still accepted) — prints the file, and ends with a See also: line naming up to three related records from generated/related.json (records that share files, tags or specific vocabulary, recomputed at every reindex). An unknown id exits 1. Over MCP: the memory_show tool and the memory://records/{id} resource.

crumb capture session

python crumb.py capture session --next "wire up the resume packet"   # git-prefilled
python crumb.py capture session --fast --next "tired — resume here"    # ~15s, no prompts

capture session reads git since the last session record and pre-fills Work Completed (git log), Files Touched (a one-line git diff --shortstat summary — N files changed, +X/-Y, not an inlined per-file list, so records stay small and the secret scanner never trips on path-shaped tokens), then asks only for narrative confirmation + a required Next Action. It writes the session record and refreshes the handoff and current.md. --fast skips all prompts and any LLM, writing a git snapshot + the one-line --next. No path requires an LLM.

The handoff is per branch (schema 4): on the default branch (origin/HEAD, else main, else master) it is handoff.md; on any other branch it is handoffs/<branch-slug>.md — feature-x writes handoffs/feature-x.md, and a branch whose name is not already its slug gets a short hash suffix (feature/parser-rewrite writes handoffs/feature-parser-rewrite-<6 hex>.md), so no two branches share a file. The first one on a branch starts with handoff.md's Current Focus and nothing else. Two agents on two branches no longer overwrite each other's Next Action, and the output names the file written (handoff: handoffs/… (updated)). current.md stays one file for the project. Without git, or with no main/master/origin/HEAD to tell branches apart, everything goes to handoff.md as before.

The bare form prompts, so it needs a terminal. To run it unattended, supply every section you want on the command line — --next plus --set "<heading>" "<text>" for each narrative heading. That keeps the git prefill, unlike --fast, which drops narrative entirely:

crumb capture session --next "wire the parser" \
  --set "Decisions Made" "kept the projection rebuild on the write path"

A --set heading is matched ignoring case, spacing and punctuation, and an unrecognized one is never fatal: the content is kept under ## Unsorted, tagged with the heading you used, and a CRUMB-WARN: line on stderr names the valid list. One wrong heading used to discard every other --set on the command line, which is the most expensive thing this tool can do to an agent writing up a long session.

A session with no --title is named from what you already said about it — the --focus, else the Next Action, else the work summary — and its filename carries four hex characters of entropy, so two agents capturing on the same day in two checkouts cannot write the same file. crumb retitle <id> "…" fixes a title written before that; it rewrites the searchable title only, since the id, slug and filename are what other records reference. dirty_files excludes .project-memory/ by default (--include-memory puts it back) and is capped — a capture rewrites the store on every firing, and in a shared tree it also sees every other session's uncommitted records.

The prefill window is bounded: since..HEAD from the newest session record's commit, or — when that is more than 20 commits back, or there is no prior record — the last 20 commits. Either way the record names the window it used, so a large diff can be read for what it is instead of taken as one sitting's work. With session_tracking: distillate, the session file is written locally but stays gitignored — promote durable items with remember to commit them.

crumb resume

python crumb.py resume                       # full bounded packet (writes generated/resume-packet.md)
python crumb.py resume --fast                # git snapshot + focus + next action + staleness (print-only)
python crumb.py resume --json                # structured packet (sections + warnings) for agents
python crumb.py resume --stale-days 14       # tighten the age cutoff (default 21)
python crumb.py resume --task "verify the perf audit"   # order sections by relevance to the task (print-only)

resume assembles a bounded, paste-anywhere packet (≤5k tokens) from the canonical records — project/branch/commit, current focus, next action, active decisions (id + one-line rationale), failed attempts to avoid (id + do-not-retry), known traps, open questions, likely files, verifications (recorded results, actionable outcomes first), and verification commands — followed by computed staleness warnings:

• handoff age + commit-distance ("handoff is 6 days old, written 14 commits behind current HEAD") — the primary "train of thought went cold" signal, carried in --json as handoff_age_days / handoff_commit_distance, separately from the stale_after_days threshold they are compared against;
• aged-unresolved open questions and active decisions older than the threshold;
• branch mismatch (record/handoff branch ≠ current HEAD, incl. detached HEAD) — only for files that have not reached HEAD; a record committed here from a since-merged branch is provenance, not a warning;
• expired (expires_at) and low-confidence records;
• lifecycle nudges: an actionable verification older than 90 days, a trap nobody has confirmed in 180, a current.md unchanged for 14 (each configurable, see Lifecycle below);
• a record citing a file that is neither on disk nor in HEAD — it may describe code that no longer exists;
• possible contradictions: a decision written after an attempt that said "do not retry" and doing much the same thing, or two live decisions that overlap heavily, written more than a week apart, neither superseding the other.

The packet reads this branch's handoff when it has one, else handoff.md, and its Project line ends with which (· handoff: handoffs/<slug>.md, · handoff: handoff.md, or · handoff: handoff.md (no branch handoff)).

A record past its expires_at is left out of the packet's lists (it stays on disk and in search), and so is a scope: branch record written on another branch. Current/handoff/active-decisions are prioritized over old session observations, and sections are capped then trimmed to stay within budget even with hundreds of records. The packet carries a source commit/inputs_hash/generated_at header so both validate and audit can detect drift. Raw transcripts are never included. --fast is a print-only reorientation view and does not overwrite the committed packet. --task TEXT reorders every list section — decisions, failed attempts, verifications, traps, open questions — by relevance to the task: the three newest entries in each stay first, then the ones the task matches, best first, then the rest. Nothing is hidden; the caps and the budget apply afterwards, so what changes is which entries survive a trim, and the packet says it is relevance-ordered (ordering in --json). It also scopes Likely Relevant Files to the records that actually match the task (and labels an empty result starting cold rather than falling back to store-global noise). It is likewise print-only. After a compaction the SessionStart hook builds its packet the same way, with the last prompt as the task.

Mutations (remember, note, verify, capture session, mark-status, and their MCP equivalents) reindex on write, so generated/resume-packet.md never silently desyncs from the records. crumb resume and crumb reindex go through that same reindex — every projection (resume-packet.md, the hook's guard-prefilter.json, related.json and conflicts.json), each written atomically — and crumb validate fails on a stale projection with a Run \crumb reindex`` hint, so the trust primitive no longer certifies drift.

The committed packet is machine-independent by construction: the project path is recorded as . rather than an absolute host path, and the inputs_hash covers only what the store's own policy shares — under session_tracking: distillate it skips the gitignored sessions/, so a teammate's clone reproduces the author's stamp exactly instead of both sides reporting each other's projection stale.

crumb search

python crumb.py search "auth middleware"        # keyword search over records
python crumb.py search --tag auth               # filter by tag/component
python crumb.py search --file src/auth/x.ts     # filter by referenced file path
python crumb.py search "session" --type decision --json
python crumb.py search "login flow" --explain   # print the stems the query became

search is a deterministic, dependency-free lookup over the canonical records (decisions, attempts, verifications, ideas, jots, traps, open questions). It matches on exact/keyword text, tags/component, and file paths — no embeddings. Same input → same output. It is the permissive lookup layer that guard builds on.

Words are compared as stems, so "reconciliation" meets "reconciler". A project's own synonyms go in .project-memory/aliases.txt (committed): one group per line, every word folding to the first — auth authn authz login. --explain prints the stems a query became, which is how you find out a synonym needs a line there; crumb audit flags a line it had to ignore.

Past 200 records, reindex also builds index/search.sqlite, a machine-local, gitignored index that lets search parse only the records that could match. It narrows and never ranks: results are identical with and without it, and a stale or missing index just means the full scan. crumb doctor reports its state.

crumb guard

python crumb.py guard "rewrite the auth middleware"                 # human report (§11 shape)
python crumb.py guard "delete the accounts table" --files src/db/accounts.ts
python crumb.py guard "store the token in the url" --json           # structured, for agents

guard is guard-before-action: given a proposed action it warns you if a failed attempt or active decision says don't go that way — the capability that separates a continuity engine from a scrapbook. It tokenizes the action, classifies it (routine edit / refactor / architecture / dependency / migration / deletion / external side effect / security-permission), searches + scores the records against §11.4 signals (same file · same tag/component · status · recency + commit-distance · branch match · explicit Do Not Retry Unless · open-blocker), and emits one verdict — PROCEED | READ_FIRST | PAUSE | ASK_HUMAN — with up to 5 ranked records, the reason each matched, and a synthesized next safest action — the recommended_action key in --json. That is advice this code composed about the action you just proposed, and it is never empty. It is not the resume packet's next_action, which is recorded state (the ## Next Action from a session handoff, "" when nobody set one). Two commands, two meanings, so two names.

Relevance decides what is surfaced; stance decides how far it can escalate. Overlap (same file, same tag, shared keywords) answers "is this record about the same thing" — it has never answered "does this record object to what I am about to do", and conflating the two made the tool punish the behaviour it exists to encourage: a trap documenting a hazard in Foo.kt, including a Safe approach: prescribing the fix, would PAUSE every edit implementing that prescribed fix. So each match carries a stance:

A high-impact action class (deletion / migration / external side effect) still escalates past both ceilings to ASK_HUMAN — that is a property of the action's blast radius, not of any record. In the human output an advisory match is tagged [context] and a blocking one [objects], so a caller can tell a record that forbids the action from one that merely names the same file.

Blast radius cuts both ways. A read-only action — cat, ls, grep, git status|log|diff, … — caps at READ_FIRST however strong the overlap, and guard --json reports it as read_only. Without that, verdict severity inverts: overlap is symmetric, so git status (which shares vocabulary with every record that discusses git) outranked npm test (which executes arbitrary code and matched nothing). Anything the classifier does not recognize — shell plumbing, an acting flag like find -delete — is treated as capable of side effects, so a missed classification costs an unnecessary PAUSE, never a swallowed one.

A file signal says who claimed it. --evidence file …, and a trap's Area / files: bullet, are the author declaring what a record is about: those score highest and read as same file(s). A path mined out of a record's prose is a mentions: — it still retrieves (a --file search finds it) but it scores lower and cannot raise a verdict on its own. Extraction is structural, so json.load, 8.13.2, AM/PM and --title/--set are not filenames; in one 310-session field store 80% of the "paths" the old lexical rule harvested did not exist, which is how a script that read a JSON file drew a PAUSE from a screenshot-testing trap.

To make a record hard-stop an action, record it as an attempt: crumb remember attempt --do-not-retry "…". A trap documents a hazard; an attempt forbids a repeat.

Two guarantees hold:

• Matched memory is data, never instruction (§15). guard reads record text to rank and cite it; it never executes phrasing found in a record body. The next safest action is synthesized from match structure; only structured evidence (e.g. a recorded verification command) is echoed back.
• Anti-noise (§19b.8). A single shared generic word never raises a warning — a stop-word filter strips generic tokens and a pure-text match needs at least two specific shared keywords; only file-path or tag/component hits qualify on their own.

Superseded/rejected/stale records, records past their expires_at, and resolved questions are demoted to a history note (mentioned, never treated as active). A stale or wrong-branch handoff surfaces the same computed staleness warnings resume shows. Verdict aggressiveness is governed by named GUARD_* thresholds at the top of the guard section in breadcrumbs/cli.py, so it can be tuned from dogfood feedback without rearchitecting.

crumb jot and crumb inbox — the short-term tier

python crumb.py jot "the flaky screenshot test only fails under pytest -n auto" \
  --file tests/test_shot.py --tags flaky,ci
python crumb.py jot "the user said not to touch the migration" --local
python crumb.py inbox                                   # triage queue
python crumb.py inbox promote jot_… trap --area tests/test_shot.py --why "…"
python crumb.py inbox drop jot_…                        # noise

Every durable write asks for a title, body sections, and evidence or an explicit --confidence low. That is the right price for a decision and the wrong price for a two-line observation — so observations at that size were simply not written down. A jot is that observation: one line, a TTL (14 days by default, ttl_jot_days in manifest.yml — the older jot_ttl_days still works), and no evidence rule. A near-verbatim repeat of a live jot is refused (exit 3) unless --allow-duplicate. --scope branch ties it to the current branch: on another branch it drops out of the packet's Inbox. Jots the hooks write are branch-scoped by default; the ones you write are not.

A jot is searchable and never judged. It rides the same corpus switch as an idea: crumb search --type jot finds it; guard never rests a verdict on it. An unconfirmed one-line note that happens to name the file you are editing must not gate the edit.

--file is what makes one findable later — it becomes file evidence, so search --file and the guard's declared-file signal both reach it.

Two inboxes, and the split is a privacy boundary. inbox/ is committed: somebody chose to write this. private/inbox/ is gitignored and is where every automatic writer must put things, because a hook cannot know whether the prompt it just saw is publishable. Machine-written content earns a commit by being promoted, never by default. For the same reason the committed resume packet lists committed jots only: a machine-local jot in a committed projection would make that file differ between two checkouts of one store while the freshness hash called both current.

Promotion goes through the normal writer. crumb inbox promote <id> decision runs the same validate gate a hand-written decision does, evidence rule included — a jot is a shortcut into memory, not around its contract. The jot's file evidence and tags carry over, and the jot is marked superseded with superseded_by pointing at the new record, so the trail from one-line note to record survives. crumb prune jots deletes expired and dropped jots older than 30 days; an active, unexpired one is never deleted however old the store is.

crumb migrate and crumb usage

python crumb.py migrate --dry-run        # what would change
python crumb.py migrate                  # apply; backs the store up first
python crumb.py usage                    # most-surfaced records
python crumb.py usage --never            # active records nothing has ever reached
python crumb.py usage --sessions         # ordered by distinct sessions, not raw count
python crumb.py usage --decay            # old records nothing surfaced in the last 180 days

migrate moves a store's on-disk format up to this build's schema_version. Steps are ordered and idempotent, manifest.yml is written after each one (so a failure halts at the last version that actually completed, never at one whose step did not finish), and the whole committed store is copied to private/migrations/<timestamp>/ first. validate names the remedy in each direction: an older store says run crumb migrate, a newer one says upgrade crumb-kit — a build must never write its own format into a store that is ahead of it. Schema 3 moves every trap and open question out of known-traps.md / open-questions.md into a file of its own under traps/ / questions/, keeping its id and every line, and turns the two files into generated indexes. Until a store migrates it keeps reading and writing the blocks. Schema 4 adds handoffs/ for one handoff per branch; a schema-3 store keeps a single handoff.md.

usage answers the question audit's [unreachable] check cannot: not whether a record could be found, but whether it ever was. A record counts when it was shown — a packet printed or injected, a guard verdict, a hook advisory — and deliberately not when a write triggers a reindex, which would make the counts measure writes. The counts live in private/usage.json and are never committed: in frontmatter they would churn every record on every guard call, and in a committed file they would conflict on every merge.

usage --decay [DAYS] (default 180) lists active decisions, attempts and traps at least DAYS old that nothing has surfaced in the last DAYS, each with the crumb mark-status <id> stale --reason "not surfaced in DAYS days" command to retire it. It prints the commands and never runs them, and it lists nothing until this machine has counted usage for DAYS. audit reports the same records as decay-candidate.

Branches and parallel sessions

A store is shared by every session in the checkout and every branch in the repository. Three things keep them apart:

• One handoff per branch (see crumb capture session). crumb prune handoffs [--dry-run] deletes a branch handoff once its branch exists neither locally nor on origin and it has not been updated for 30 days.
• Branch-scoped records. crumb jot --scope branch and crumb verify --scope branch (and scope on memory_jot / memory_verify) write a record that applies only on the current branch. Elsewhere it leaves the resume packet's lists, guard's live set and the prompt hook's injections, is not held against a similar record as a near-duplicate, and stays searchable.
• One writer at a time. Commands that write the store take a lock file, .project-memory/private/.write-lock. A second writer waits up to 2 seconds and then exits 1 with store is locked by pid N; try again, or remove a stale lock; a hook waits 0.5 seconds and then skips its write rather than stall the agent (the prompt hook still injects records); an MCP writer returns {ok: false, error}. The holder refreshes the lock every 15 seconds; one untouched for 60 seconds, or (on POSIX) whose process on this machine is gone, is broken automatically. Only invocations that write wait: resume, listings (inbox, traps, consolidate without --merge), search, guard, show, validate and audit never do.

crumb scan-secrets and crumb traps

python crumb.py scan-secrets                 # gate before committing memory
python crumb.py traps --stale                # traps nobody has confirmed within ttl_trap_days (180)
python crumb.py traps --confirm "trap_…"     # "still true", dated, in the trap's own file

scan-secrets blocks on shapes with real structure — AWS keys, PEM blocks, bearer tokens, a file it could not read. The bare high-entropy heuristic warns instead: it has no structure behind it, and gating on it punished exactly the records that cite a concrete production path (a Firebase push id is public, 20 characters of base64url, timestamp-prefixed — diagnostically not a secret). A gate that is hand-overridden on every commit has stopped being a gate. Put one regex per line in .project-memory/.crumbignore to retire a false positive once, in a file your reviewers can see, instead of re-deciding it.

traps reports what the always-on trap context costs and which traps nobody has confirmed lately, never-confirmed first. Age alone cannot retire a trap — an old trap may be perfectly live — so --confirm records the fact that was missing: when somebody last checked (the last_confirmed frontmatter key; a - Last confirmed: bullet on a schema-2 store). Retire one with crumb mark-status <id> stale; it stays on disk for history and stops driving guard. audit raises traps-growth when the active traps' text outgrows its budget (on a schema-2 store, the whole of known-traps.md).

Lifecycle: crumb expired, questions, consolidate, rollup

python crumb.py expired                          # active records past their expires_at
python crumb.py questions --aging                # open questions older than 45 days
python crumb.py consolidate                      # clusters of near-duplicates
python crumb.py consolidate --merge dec_… dec_… --title "One account of the auth choice"
python crumb.py rollup sessions --before 2026-09-01 --dry-run

Records go stale. Nothing is retired or merged automatically — expiry hides a record from the packet and guard, the rest are warnings — and the only command that deletes files is rollup, which only touches machine snapshots.

Every type has a lifespan, set per store in manifest.yml: ttl_jot_days (14), ttl_question_days (45), ttl_verification_days (90), ttl_trap_days (180), ttl_current_days (14). A jot or a settled verification gets an expires_at; once past it, the record keeps its status and stays in search, but leaves the packet's lists and guard's live set. crumb expired lists those. An actionable verification, an unconfirmed trap and an untouched current.md never expire — the packet warns about them instead. crumb questions --aging lists open questions past their lifespan. Decisions and attempts have no lifespan.

consolidate groups near-duplicates audit finds into clusters. --merge <id> <id>… --title "…" writes one decision, attempt, verification or idea whose sections are each source's text in date order, tagged _(from <id>)_ (--set HEADING TEXT replaces a section), with the sources' evidence and tags combined and their lowest confidence; every source is marked superseded. Edit the merged body before relying on it.

Contradictions are reported, never resolved: a decision written after an attempt that said "do not retry" and doing much the same thing, or two live decisions that overlap heavily and were written more than a week apart. They are written to generated/conflicts.json at reindex and shown in the packet and in audit (possible-contradiction).

rollup sessions --before <date> folds the machine session snapshots (placeholder Next Action) created before the date into one session record — a one-line summary per snapshot — and deletes them. Sessions somebody wrote are never touched. The rollup takes the date and commit of the last snapshot it replaces, so the Stop hook's next capture still diffs from the right commit.

crumb promote and crumb demote — the long-term tier

python crumb.py promote dec_…                     # into CLAUDE.md, else AGENTS.md (never creates either)
python crumb.py promote att_… --to AGENTS.md      # a named file
python crumb.py promote trap_… --rule "stop the daemon by pid, never with --stop"
python crumb.py demote dec_…                      # take the rule back out

Memory here comes in three tiers. The short term — current.md, handoff.md, jots — is what is in flight. The medium term is the typed records: decisions, attempts, traps, questions, verifications, which can go stale and are surfaced by the packet, guard and the hooks. The long term is the agent's own instruction file, CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md, which the harness loads whole every session and nothing ages out of. Breadcrumbs keeps the first two; promote is the bridge to the third.

crumb promote <id> turns an active decision, attempt or trap into one line in a managed block of its own, separate from the init signpost:

## Project rules promoted from memory
- Use sqlite for the cache. _(why: concurrent writers corrupted the JSON file; source: `dec_20260922_use-sqlite-for-the-cache`)_

The rule is rendered from the record (a decision's title, an attempt's "do not retry … unless …", a trap's summary and safe approach), or given with --rule. A record that is not active, or is confidence: low, is refused. The record stays active; the resume packet leaves it out of its lists (the instruction file already carries it) and says how many it left out, guard still uses it, and search marks it promoted. Promoting again re-renders the line; there is only ever one per record.

crumb demote <id> removes the line; so does retiring the record with mark-status … stale (or superseded, rejected, disputed), because a rule nobody believes any more must not stay in the file every session loads. crumb audit suggests decisions and attempts that have held for at least 60 days and surfaced in at least five sessions (promote-candidate), and flags rules whose record is gone or retired (demote-candidate), rules that no longer match their record (promoted-drift), and a block over 4000 characters (promoted-bloat).

There is no MCP tool for this, on purpose: an agent writing its own permanent instructions through a tool call is how a prompt injection makes itself permanent. A person runs crumb promote, or an agent runs it where a person can see the command.

Integrations — make the store actually get used

A memory store only helps if the agent consults it. crumb init can wire the store into your agent so it does — every edit is fenced and reversible:

crumb init --with-adapter --with-mcp --with-hooks   # all three (non-interactive)
crumb init --print-integrations                     # dry run: show what would change
crumb init --remove-integrations                    # cleanly reverse everything
crumb doctor                                        # is memory wired up? (exit 1 if not)

On a terminal with no integration flags, init asks once per integration. Each piece is independent:

• Adapter signpost (--with-adapter[=CLAUDE.md,AGENTS.md]) — injects a small managed block into the agent-guidance files that already exist, telling the agent to read the resume packet, guard before risky actions, and note/ capture as it goes. It never creates a file you don't already have, and stays well under the bloat threshold so audit stays green. --remove-integrations removes this block only: rules added with crumb promote sit in a block of their own and stay, since they are the project's instructions now.

• MCP registration (--with-mcp) — merges a breadcrumbs server into .mcp.json (preserving any other servers). Needs the optional [mcp] extra to actually run: pip install "crumb-kit[mcp]" (the SDK needs Python ≥ 3.10; on 3.9 that command succeeds and installs nothing). Both MCP SDK 1.x and 2.x work — 2.0 renamed the server class, so an older crumb-kit paired with a new SDK reports "SDK not installed"; upgrade crumb-kit if you see that.

• Claude Code hooks (--with-hooks[=session,guard,capture,prompt,compact,subagent]) — merges six hooks into .claude/settings.json so memory is consulted without the agent choosing to:

  • SessionStart → crumb hook session loads the resume packet as context. After a compaction (source: compact) it first says what was in flight: the last prompt, the records that were surfaced for it, and anything the miner salvaged. The model that just lost its context is the one reader who cannot reconstruct that for itself.

  • PreToolUse → crumb hook guard runs a cost-aware guard before risky Bash/Edit calls and before a subagent launch (a cheap local risk pre-filter keeps the common path free of record I/O). A subagent starts cold, and its launch prompt is the best description of a proposed action a session produces; a launch caps at READ_FIRST, because the launch is not itself the irreversible act and the subagent's own tool calls hit this same guard. it surfaces matched memory but never decides for you — it neither allows nor denies. PROCEED→silent, READ_FIRST→the matched records as context with the normal permission flow untouched, PAUSE/ASK_HUMAN→ask, with the reason.

    It will not re-raise a prompt you have opted out of. The hook reads the session's permission_mode, and under bypassPermissions (--dangerously-skip-permissions) or dontAsk it emits no permission decision at all — the matched records still arrive as context, but the interruption you turned off stays off. Set CRUMB_GUARD_ADVISORY=1 to get that advisory-only shape in every mode.

  • UserPromptSubmit → crumb hook prompt injects the records that are about this prompt — the moment the task is finally known, and the one the recency-ordered resume packet cannot serve. It scores the prompt with the same retrieval guard uses and shows at most five matches, pointing at crumb show <id> (or memory://records/{id}) for the full text. It injects current records only: a superseded, stale or expired record, or an answered question, stays out, because the injected line does not show status. It never blocks: that decision is available on this event and it erases the prompt, which is the worst thing a memory tool could do.

    It also captures corrections. A prompt beginning "no, don't…" is a durable constraint arriving as an ordinary message, and nothing used to write it down, so the next session re-violated it. Captured to private/inbox/ only, after a secret scan; capture_corrections: false in manifest.yml turns it off.

  • PreCompact → crumb hook compact mines the transcript just before the context is destroyed. Compaction is the biggest memory-loss event in a long session and this hook cannot speak to the model at all (its stdout goes to the debug log), so it writes candidates to private/inbox/ and leaves a marker that the next SessionStart reads.

  • SubagentStop → crumb hook subagent mines a finished subagent's transcript. Its findings otherwise vanish: the parent only ever sees the final message. It does not hold the subagent — that is a prompt-fatigue question awaiting a field test, and subagent_extraction is reserved for it.

  • Stop → crumb hook capture snapshots a session record when the turn ends — once per unit of work, not once per turn: a firing is skipped when the HEAD commit and dirty-file set are unchanged since the newest session record, and its stand-in Next Action never overwrites one you set.

    It also mines the transcript on every firing, which is a side effect and not a decision: even a firing that stays silent should salvage what the transcript shows, because nothing reads it again.

    When the ending turn produced new commits — or the miner found a failed-then-fixed command, or three candidates of any kind — the hook does more than snapshot: it holds the stop once (the extraction turn) and hands the agent a concrete instruction, with the mined candidates listed by id. That turns the request from "compose a record about what just happened", at the moment the model has least context left, into "promote this one, drop that one". Record any durable decision, failed attempt, or verification (crumb remember / verify / mark-status / crumb inbox promote), then crumb capture session --next "…". That last command is also what clears the prompt, so completing the instruction and moving on are the same act. This is what makes the agent the memory author with no human in the loop: the request lands while the model still holds the session's "why", instead of relying on a signpost it read hundreds of turns ago. Proportionality rules keep it quiet: edit-only turns and no-change turns never prompt, a continuation of a held stop is never held again (the machine snapshot is the floor if the agent ignores the instruction), and the very first firing in a store takes a silent baseline instead of interrogating the agent about pre-existing history. A candidate the agent declined is never offered again in the same session. Opt out per project with extraction_prompt: false in manifest.yml — which stops the prompt, not the mining.

  The installed command is a small POSIX-sh resolver, not a bare crumb: it tries $PATH, then ./.venv (POSIX and Windows layouts), then any interpreter that can import breadcrumbs. That covers a container that provisions the CLI after the hooks are wired, and a Windows pip install --user whose Scripts directory is not on the PATH bash inherited. If none of them resolve, the hooks stay silent except SessionStart, which reports that memory is inactive rather than returning an empty result that looks like a healthy no-op.

  Using your own launcher is supported. Point the command at any wrapper you like and keep the "breadcrumbsHook": "<event>" key on the hook entry — that key is what crumb doctor and --remove-integrations match on, whatever the command looks like.

  An entry without the key is still recognized when its command names crumb and passes a hook event as an argument (./crumb-hook.sh guard), so doctor reports it as installed. But --remove-integrations never deletes an unmarked entry — it lists it and leaves it alone, because a heuristic match is not proof breadcrumbs wrote it. To get a clean uninstall for a launcher you wrote by hand, run crumb init --with-hooks first: that adopts the entry, stamping the marker without touching your command, and removal then takes it.

crumb doctor reports whether each piece is in place (and whether the resume packet is stale), exiting non-zero when a store exists but nothing is wired up. When rules have been promoted it also reports how many, and their size, per instruction file.

Every hook firing also appends one line to private/hook-log.jsonl: the event, how long it took and what the host received (silent, context, a permission prompt, a held stop, or skipped on the store lock), plus counts and verdicts. It never records a prompt, command, path or transcript text, and it is capped at 5000 lines. crumb doctor --hook-log summarises it per hook, and docs/field-test.md is the protocol for reading it after a real session.

crumb mcp serve runs the server over stdio (same as breadcrumbs-mcp); crumb mcp register is the standalone form of --with-mcp.

Upgrading on Windows

On Windows, crumb mcp register registers the server as <your-python> -m breadcrumbs mcp serve rather than the breadcrumbs-mcp.exe console script. This is deliberate. pip install --upgrade "crumb-kit[mcp]" fails at the uninstall step with OSError: [WinError 32] on Scripts\breadcrumbs-mcp.exe whenever any MCP server is running — every live editor session holds that shim open, and orphaned ones linger, so the upgrade can fail against a server you did not know existed. The shim is opened without FILE_SHARE_DELETE, so Windows refuses rename as well as delete and the usual "rename the old exe aside" trick does not work either. Launching through the interpreter means a running server holds Python open, which pip never needs to delete.

If an upgrade does fail this way, your install is fine. pip's rollback is clean: the previously installed version is restored intact. Close the editor sessions running an MCP server (or stop the breadcrumbs-mcp processes) and run the upgrade again. Re-run crumb mcp register afterwards to move an existing .mcp.json onto the interpreter form.

Note that an in-place upgrade does not restart running servers — they keep executing the old code until the editor is restarted, so restart it after upgrading.

Plain-file fallback (cloud agents, no CLI)

The tool degrades gracefully when crumb cannot run (e.g. a read-only cloud agent). With the default policy commit_generated_projections: true, resume writes generated/resume-packet.md and that file is committed, so an agent that cannot execute the CLI can still reorient by reading:

1. .project-memory/generated/resume-packet.md — the pre-built bounded packet; then
2. the plain canonical files directly — current.md, handoff.md (on a feature branch, handoffs/<branch-slug>.md if it exists), decisions/, attempts/, traps/, questions/. known-traps.md and open-questions.md are one-line-per-record indexes of the last two, each line naming the file to open (on a store still at schema_version 2 they hold the traps and questions themselves).

Everything is human-readable Markdown, so no binary store or vendor runtime is required to resume. (generated/resume-packet.md is a rebuildable projection — if it disagrees with the canonical records, the records win and it should be regenerated; both validate and audit flag this drift by comparing the packet's stamped inputs_hash against the canonical inputs, and mutations reindex it automatically so it stays in step.)

Status

Installed vs. this checkout. The table below describes the code in this checkout, whose version is whatever crumb --version prints — the single source of truth is __version__ in breadcrumbs/__init__.py, and the top section of CHANGELOG.md says what it contains. This blurb deliberately names no version: it used to pin one by hand and was four releases stale before anyone noticed. Work landing after the newest released version collects in CHANGELOG.md → [Unreleased]; whenever that section is non-empty, pipx install crumb-kit gives you less than this checkout does.

The full loop (capture → resume → trust) is complete and CI-guarded, and ships as a pipx-installable crumb binary (see Install above). An optional MCP server (pip install "crumb-kit[mcp]") exposes the same memory engine to agents without shelling out — a thin wrapper over the same core functions, never required for baseline use. The Integrations layer (crumb init --with-*, crumb doctor, crumb hook) wires that engine into your agent so the store is consulted automatically rather than only when an agent remembers to. See docs/ for the architecture, record schema, CLI spec, MCP spec, and security posture, and docs/roadmap-working-memory.md for the phased plan that takes the tool from a ledger to a working memory.

Memory is advisory

Current user instruction, source code, tests, build output, current authoritative docs, and security policy outrank anything stored in .project-memory/. If memory conflicts with reality, mark it disputed or stale and link evidence — do not let it override the present.