About Lockstep

Every company makes decisions all day, in Slack, Jira, Notion, Docs, and pull requests. Those decisions steer the codebase, but they live in people's heads and in threads that scroll away. Engineers forget them. AI coding agents never hear them at all.

Lockstep is the decision memory for that world. It captures decisions from the tools your company already uses, makes each one binding when its owner confirms it, and briefs every person and every AI agent, via MCP, before they touch the code. When a change drifts from a binding decision, Lockstep catches it at the pull request, before it ships. Lockstep is open source (Apache-2.0) and can be self-hosted. See how it works.

We believe the next decade of developer tooling gets built one layer up: not in the record of what happened, but in the layer that reads across every source and keeps humans and agents in step. That thesis runs through our writing.

Why we built it

Every codebase is governed by decisions nobody wrote down. “We use JWTs, not session cookies.” “The mobile app depends on the v2 endpoint, so don't break it.” People pick these up slowly, through code reviews and hallway conversations. AI coding agents never do: every session starts blank, and if a decision isn't in the agent's context, it doesn't exist. We wrote up the full argument in Introducing Lockstep.

Decision logs were supposed to fix this, and they mostly don't, because someone has to stop and file every entry. Under deadline pressure the filing stops first. So Lockstep removes the filing step instead of asking for more discipline. More on that in the engineering decision log.

What Lockstep does

• Captures decisions from Slack, Notion, Jira, Google Docs, Confluence, and pull requests. Slack is the most mature source.
• Confirms each one with its owner in a single click. Nothing becomes binding on its own.
• Briefs engineers and AI coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, any MCP agent) on the decisions that touch their work.
• Flags pull requests that may conflict with a binding decision. It warns by default; blocking is opt-in.

The full pipeline is on how it works, and the short version is what is Lockstep.

Open source and self-hosting

Lockstep is Apache-2.0 and the code is on GitHub. You can run it on your own infrastructure, which matters for a tool that reads where your company makes decisions. How we handle data, including what we don't have yet, is on the security page.

Where we are

Lockstep is early. We're working with a small number of design partners. If your team loses decisions in Slack threads, or your AI agents keep building against calls you reversed weeks ago, we'd like to hear from you.