Hypergraph

A protocol for keeping research projects legible to fresh agents. Hypergraph maintains two graphs per project, kept as markdown files committed in your repo:

• Record graph — the append-only log of everything that happened: decisions, experiments, evidence, dead ends. Optimized for audit, not orientation.
• State graph — a small, single-writer, distilled projection of what is true now: architecture, what works, what's broken or open (the frontier), and accumulated negative knowledge. Every state node cites the record nodes it derives from — that many-to-one cross-graph provenance is the "hypergraph".

The problem it solves: on a mature project, cold-start orientation over an append-only DAG means traversing thousands of nodes. With Hypergraph, a fresh agent reads the frontier in ≤ ~6 tool calls and follows provenance slugs into the record graph only where the task demands history.

How it stays coherent with many parallel agents: knowledge lands record-first — every record node declares its ## State Impact (or none: <reason>), and a separate single-writer reconcile pass folds declared impacts into the state graph behind an append-only high-water mark. Nobody edits state inline. Forward work follows the same rule: new directions (including Operator directives) enter as decision record nodes whose impacts open Status: open state nodes — the frontier carries intent as claims about gaps, never as task lists.

Where the graphs live

In your repo. Each node is a committed markdown file under .hypergraph/graph/<record|state>/<slug>.md — frontmatter carrying identity and parent slugs, body carrying the content verbatim (local-adapter.md). Nothing to sign in to, nothing to install a server for: the graphs travel with the repo, work offline, merge through git, and check in CI.

There is no backend to choose. The protocol is still written against a thin abstract interface — ~10 operations — but that is a portability property, not a setting: it is what a replacement store would have to satisfy, and why nothing in the spec above the Storage section mentions files.

Optionally, hypergraph push mirrors your committed node files to a hosted Flywheel graph you own, so agents that aren't sitting in your working tree can read them. The mirror is a one-way, regenerable projection — your files stay canonical — and it is entirely a property of the CLI: the skills don't know it exists, and a project without it never touches that path (mirror.md).

Working in parallel

Several agents, a fork and a pull request, a colleague on another machine — the two graphs already split along the line git merges on, so the rule falls out of the invariants rather than adding machinery (SPEC: Collaboration):

Contributors record; the maintainer reconciles.

The record graph is append-only with one file per node, so concurrent branches produce new files and merge without conflict — and each record node arrives in the pull request as a file, so the claim is reviewed beside the code that justifies it. The state graph has a single writer (I3), so reconcile runs once on the default branch over everything that merged. Publishing follows the same line: the mirror is a build artifact of the default branch, so hypergraph push stands down at exit 0 on a feature branch or on a clone whose credentials don't own the mirror. Nobody needs a credential to contribute.

Two workflows in templates/github-actions/ make it enforceable: hypergraph check --since origin/<base> fails a pull request that changes files without recording anything, and a publish job refreshes the mirror on merge.

What ships

• SPEC.md — the protocol: invariants I1–I8 + conventions.
• skills/ — five Claude skills: hypergraph-init, hypergraph-adopt (bring a project with a past under the protocol: legacy-graph import or authored prehistory, adoption epoch, AGENTS.md onboarding), hypergraph-record, hypergraph-reconcile, hypergraph-orient.
• tools/hypergraph.py — single-file uv script: check validates the mechanical invariants over JSON graph exports (CI-ready, nonzero exit on violations); render generates STATE.md (frontier first, architecture tree below); viz emits a self-contained interactive HTML visualization — four views (Timeline, Frontier, Provenance, Clusters), each with a layout that fits its data (zero JS dependencies, no network; opens straight from file://), or an excaligraph spec for hand-editable excalidraw figures; export/import/new/ update are the storage layer, hwm reports the reconciliation frontier, and push/sync/mirror the optional mirror; upgrade refreshes an adopted repo's copies of the skills and the AGENTS.md block.
• templates/ — the exact markdown shapes the checker parses.

Install

uv tool install hypergraph-protocol
hypergraph skills install          # → ./.claude/skills (project scope)

That is the whole install: the CLI from PyPI, and the five skills into the repo you are working in (--user puts them in ~/.claude/skills instead). Nothing to clone, nothing to fork.

Updating later takes two commands, because it is two different things:

uv tool upgrade hypergraph-protocol   # the CLI — lives outside your repo
hypergraph upgrade                    # the copies — skills, AGENTS.md block, workflows

skills install writes real files into your repo, so uv tool upgrade cannot see them and they go stale silently. hypergraph upgrade refreshes what is already there — it never installs what is not, so it will not drop CI into a repo that never had it, and drifted workflows are reported rather than overwritten (--workflows opts in). It also stamps hypergraph_version: into the config, which is what lets check tell you which half is behind. Node files themselves need no migration: they are additive markdown, and an older CLI reads a newer graph.

Quickstart

Two routes in, depending on whether the project has a past. Both are Claude skills — run them in a session inside your project repo.

New project → hypergraph-init: creates both roots, a state skeleton mirroring your architecture, .hypergraph/config.yml, and STATE.md.

#   run hypergraph-init            → roots + state skeleton + config + STATE.md
#   ... do work; run hypergraph-record after each unit of work
#   run hypergraph-reconcile       → fold impacts into state, regenerate STATE.md
#   (fresh session) hypergraph-orient → frontier brief in ≤ ~6 tool calls

Existing project → hypergraph-adopt: a repo with real history, an existing hosted graph, or both. It surveys the repo (git shape, timeline signals, docs, churn), interviews you for what only you know, then either imports the legacy graph verbatim (hypergraph import --fork preserves node_ids and slugs, so provenance and the high-water mark stay valid) or authors honest prehistory from the repo itself. It draws an adoption epoch so legacy nodes are exempt from template compliance, distills a state graph from what the project actually knows, and installs the AGENTS.md onboarding. The import is a fork: the source graph stays frozen as the archive, and the repo becomes the continuing graph, owning its whole history with the original topology. Artifacts do not travel — they stay on the archive, and the adopted project says so. After either route, the loop is the same.

The whole loop, in the repo — no account, no network:

hypergraph new record --title "Fixed the streaming parser" --body body.md \
    --parent <causal-slug> --impact "<state-slug> — status broken → working" --repo-auto
hypergraph export --config .hypergraph/config.yml     # node files → cache JSON
hypergraph check --record .hypergraph/cache/record.json \
    --state .hypergraph/cache/state.json --config .hypergraph/config.yml
git add .hypergraph/graph                             # the memory travels with the repo

Checker/renderer/visualizer, standalone:

hypergraph check  --record .hypergraph/cache/record.json --state .hypergraph/cache/state.json
hypergraph render --state .hypergraph/cache/state.json --config .hypergraph/config.yml -o STATE.md
hypergraph viz    --record .hypergraph/cache/record.json --state .hypergraph/cache/state.json \
                  --config .hypergraph/config.yml -o .hypergraph/viz.html
open .hypergraph/viz.html          # interactive: pan/zoom, click nodes, search; SVG/PDF export

The page has four views, each named after the question it answers, and each with a layout that fits the shape of its data:

• Timeline — the record graph as git log --graph lanes, time along x. A record graph is a timeline with a few concurrent threads, not a DAG to be ranked. Chips are compact; the x axis switches between even rank spacing and real dates with idle gaps compressed. A rule marks the high-water mark and the unreconciled tail behind it is tinted.
• Frontier — the state graph as a status board: broken | blocked | open | working | superseded, frontier first, newest work first inside a column. Empty columns collapse to a labelled rail rather than vanishing, because "nothing is broken" is an answer. A toggle switches to the architecture tree from STATE.md.
• Provenance — record log and state projection side by side. Cross-graph links default to focus: none are drawn until you select or hover a node, because 177 links over 51 nodes is a hairball however it is drawn. All bundles them into one ribbon per claim through a shared spine.
• Clusters — each state node's contributing record set drawn as a blob, using a signed distance field (per-member outline, a corridor along a spanning tree, smooth merging, and non-members pushing the boundary away) rather than a convex hull, which would swallow whatever sat between three far-apart members.

Underneath, a Display section mixes the pieces freely: graph visibility, node style, layout, cross-link mode and per-species edge toggles. Nothing fits below 0.45 zoom — a view that does not fit scrolls instead of shrinking to illegibility. The layout is deterministic: no randomness anywhere, so two renders of the same graph give identical output. The sidebar is resizable (drag the divider) and collapsible (click it); exports live in the header's download menu. Deep links: viz.html#timeline, #frontier, #provenance, #clusters, or #<any-slug> to jump to a node. The pre-rename hashes (#record, #state, #combo, #hyper) still resolve.

Excalidraw figures

For a figure you can hand-edit, viz also emits a graph spec for excaligraph (MIT), which turns it into an Excalidraw scene. It is deliberately a two-step: hypergraph.py never shells out, and node stays optional.

hypergraph viz --format excaligraph \
    --record .hypergraph/cache/record.json --state .hypergraph/cache/state.json \
    --config .hypergraph/config.yml -o graph.yaml
excaligraph build graph.yaml -o graph.excalidraw     # then open it in excalidraw.com
excaligraph preview graph.excalidraw -o graph.svg    # …or render it headlessly

Live mode

--live writes viz.html plus a sibling viz.data.json, and the page polls that file, redrawing and pulsing whatever appeared since the last poll — a status board for a run in progress. It is the one output that is deliberately not self-contained, which is why it is a flag and not the default:

hypergraph viz --live --record .hypergraph/cache/record.json \
    --state .hypergraph/cache/state.json --config .hypergraph/config.yml \
    -o .hypergraph/viz.html
python3 -m http.server -d .hypergraph      # browsers block fetch from file://

Re-run export and viz --live (from a watcher, a commit hook, or a loop) and the open page catches up on its own. If the data file cannot be reached, the indicator in the header says so and polling stops rather than failing silently.

Nodes are coloured by the same status palette the page uses, so a figure and the page never disagree, and each one carries a link: back to its markdown source. Each state node's impact set becomes a hyperedge blob. Cross-graph edges are off by default (--links none|provenance|impact|all) for the same reason the page defaults to focus — and because the impact relation is the blob membership, so drawing it again as edges says nothing new.

Repo map

SPEC.md                     the protocol (invariants + conventions)
backend/INTERFACE.md        ~10 abstract operations — the portability contract
backend/local-adapter.md    op → node files + hypergraph CLI (git-native; the one impl)
backend/mirror.md           optional one-way mirroring — CLI internals, not agent-facing
backend/flywheel.md         the host's payload/lease contract, for the mirror code only
skills/hypergraph-*/        the five skills (.claude/skills/ symlinks these)
templates/                  record-node / state-node / config shapes
templates/github-actions/   PR check + publish-on-merge workflows
tools/hypergraph.py         checker + renderer + visualizer + storage + mirror (uv script)
tools/bundle_viz.py         dev tool: bundles tools/viz/* into the page constant
tools/viz/                  the viz page's sources (html + css + js parts)
tools/fixtures/             test fixtures (clean, violations, local-graph, self)
tests/                      pytest suites (checker, viz, storage, mirror, collaboration, adoption, upgrade)
tests/browser/              playwright layout baselines (dev group; self-skipping)

This repo dogfoods itself: see .hypergraph/config.yml and STATE.md.

Developing the protocol itself

Only if you are working on this repo — adopters never clone it. In a dev checkout the CLI is uv run tools/hypergraph.py … ([tool.uv] package = false, so the bare hypergraph does not resolve here), and ./install.sh symlinks skills/ into ~/.claude/skills so an edit to a skill is live in the next session.

./install.sh                       # symlink the skills into ~/.claude/skills
uv run pytest tests/               # checker + viz + storage + mirror suites
uv run tools/hypergraph.py sync --config .hypergraph/config.yml