Tribal
Semantic compression for project knowledge.
Tribal captures the engineering knowledge that does not get written down in code or tickets. The reasoning behind a load-bearing decision, the heuristic someone keeps reaching for, the breakthrough that closed a gnarly bug. It runs as a Model Context Protocol server, ingests text on demand, and exposes a graph of items connected by what they support, contradict, or refine. Your agent harness talks to it the same way it talks to any other MCP tool.
Tribal is not trying to remember everything. It preserves what remains useful after the work is done.
Quick start
Start with the skills. Tribal runs inside your agent, and the skills teach it to install, verify, wire, and troubleshoot Tribal. Installing them and letting the agent drive is the most reliable path:
npx skills add tribal-memory/skillsThen ask your agent to set Tribal up. The steps below are what the skills walk it through, or what to run by hand. The agent can help either way.
If you plan to use a cloud provider (OpenAI or Anthropic), export its API key in your shell before you launch the agent harness, so the harness and the Tribal binary it spawns inherit it. A key exported into a terminal the harness is already running in is not picked up until you relaunch. Setting it up front removes a lot of the early configuration friction.
