Vivac

A tree where every node knows which node it was born from.

So that months later something can still answer “why are we here?”

$ vivac why 4

  Why we are here  ->  t4
  ------------------------------------------------------------------

  g1    Ship the 2.0 API
        the first customer is waiting on it
        (4 open / 1 closed below)
        |
        v
  t2    Replace the cache adapter
        the session bug traces back to it
        (3 open / 1 closed below)
        |
        v
  t4    No test for expiry  [closed]
        no way to reproduce the session bug
        ! the corpus run is what settled it
        = reproduced: sessions expire at 300s, not 3600

        ^^^ you are here

  In parallel, still open (3):
      t3     Rate limiting is undecided
      d5     Retry policy: three tries, then fail loudly
      t6     Migrate the callers

  t2 does not close until these close (1):
      t6     Migrate the callers

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.

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.