Meridian

Team decision trail for AI-assisted development.

AI makes individual engineers faster. Nobody has solved coherent, maintainable software built by a team over time. Every handoff loses context. Meridian captures it.

Install

npm install -g meridian-dev
meridian init

Then in a Claude Code session:

/init-memory     # Persistent context for this repo

Your AI sessions now resume where you left off instead of cold-starting.

What It Does

For You (solo engineer)

• Persistent memory — sessions pick up where the last one ended
• Automatic journal — decisions and rationale extracted from every session
• Searchable history — meridian search-journals "auth refactor"
• Drift detection — AI flags when work drifts from the stated goal

For Your Team

• Digests — weekly summaries tailored per role (engineering, product, design, strategy)
• Slack bot — anyone on the team asks @meridian and gets answers from the decision trail
• Signal connectors — pull context from GitHub, Intercom, and Notion into digests
• Context shift detection — surfaces significant pivots and architecture changes

Only the engineer installs anything. Everyone else sees a Slack digest.

/init-team       # Set up team context, journals, and digests

How It Works

Plain Files, Not Databases

All context is plain markdown in directories you control:

~/.claude/
  global-state.md           # Thin index — always loaded at session start
  memory/
    journal/YYYY-MM-DD.md   # Daily decision log

<repo>/.claude/
  state.md                  # Per-repo: branch, status, next steps

No proprietary formats. No vendor lock-in. grep works if Meridian breaks.

The Session Protocol

Start: AI reads state files, summarizes context, asks "What's the goal?"

Mid-session: If work drifts from the goal, the AI flags it.

End: Decisions are extracted, written as journal entries, and synced to the team repo — automatically via hooks.

Digests

Each role sees the same underlying data through a different lens:

• Engineering: What shipped, what drifted, patterns
• Product: What shipped vs. planned, discovery signals
• Design: UX decisions, implementation gaps vs. design intent
• Strategy: Cross-team patterns, drift trends, capability gaps

Signal Connectors

meridian pull github       # Issues, PRs, Actions status
meridian pull intercom     # Support conversations, tags, response times
meridian pull notion       # Pages, databases, comments
meridian pull --all        # All configured channels

Commands

| Command | Description | |---------|-------------| | meridian init | Install for your AI tool | | meridian doctor | Check installation health | | meridian update | Update to latest version | | meridian status | Cross-project status | | meridian team create | Create a new team | | meridian team join | Join an existing team | | meridian digest | Generate persona-specific digests | | meridian digest --deliver | Generate and post to Slack | | meridian bot | Start the Slack bot | | meridian reindex | Index journals + conversations | | meridian search-journals <q> | Search decision history | | meridian pull <channel> | Pull signals from a source | | meridian journal sync | Sync journals to team repo | | meridian onboard <repo> | Generate onboarding context pack | | meridian deploy init | Scaffold Docker deployment |

Run meridian help for the full list.

Environment Variables

For digests and bot

| Variable | Description | |----------|-------------| | ANTHROPIC_API_KEY | Digest generation and bot answers | | SLACK_BOT_TOKEN | Slack bot token (xoxb-...) | | SLACK_APP_TOKEN | Slack app-level token (xapp-...) | | GITHUB_TOKEN | Signal data and journal sync |

Optional

| Variable | Description | |----------|-------------| | OPENAI_API_KEY | Semantic search embeddings (full-text works without it) | | MERIDIAN_LLM_MODEL | LLM for digests (default: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929) | | MERIDIAN_DIGEST_SCHEDULE | Cron schedule (default: 0 8 * * 1 — Monday 8am) | | MERIDIAN_EXCLUDE_REPOS | Repos to exclude from digests | | MERIDIAN_TELEMETRY | true for anonymous usage telemetry |

Tool Support

| Tool | Status | Setup | |------|--------|-------| | Claude Code | Full support | meridian init | | Cursor | Session protocol | meridian init-cursor | | Generic | Manual | See specializations/generic/ |

What's Open Source

Everything that runs on your machine is open source (Apache 2.0).

| Open Source (this repo) | Commercial (future) | |---|---| | CLI and all commands | Cloud-hosted team aggregation | | Session protocol and journal extraction | Managed digest delivery | | Content store and search | Web dashboard | | Signal connectors (GitHub, Intercom, Notion) | SSO and tenant isolation | | Digest generation (your API key) | | | Slack bot (self-hosted) | | | Multi-team support | |

See LICENSING.md for details.

Architecture

• Data Flow — sessions to digests
• Principles — the eight constraints
• Content Store — indexing, search, schema
• Signal Channels — connector architecture
• Signal Roadmap — planned connectors

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Good first contributions:

• Specializations for AI tools (Windsurf, Aider, Continue)
• Signal connectors for new tools (Linear, Jira, Slack, HubSpot)
• Bug reports and feature requests via issues

License

Apache 2.0. See LICENSE and LICENSING.md.