1. Overview
AI coding agents forget. A decision your team settled three sessions ago — a validation rule, a scoping convention, a "never do X" — has no home once the conversation that produced it scrolls out of context. The next session re-infers conventions from the code alone, and quietly contradicts what was already decided. codekeel is a governance layer that fixes the forgetting: record a decision once, and it gets enforced automatically on every future edit, in every future session.
codekeel is free and open source, licensed under AGPL-3.0. No account, no server, no paid tier — you can read every line of what runs on your machine.
The four stages
- 1. Capture — record a decision via
/decision, or accept one codekeel noticed on its own. - 2. Inject — every active decision loads into context automatically at the start of each session.
- 3. Enforce — every edit inside a decision's scope is checked against it before it lands.
- 4. Review — contradictions and stale entries surface for a quick human call, never a silent guess.
Two ledgers
A project ledger (ledger/DECISIONS.yaml) lives inside the repo, is git-committed, and is shared with anyone else working on it. A global ledger lives in your home directory and applies to every project on this machine — for your own personal conventions, not repo-specific ones. Both get merged at session start; an entry can move between them later with ledger promote / ledger demote without being re-recorded from scratch.
ANTHROPIC_API_KEYto additionally unlock the live model call that catches drift a fixed pattern can't reduce to — see Privacy & data.