What is Lockstep?
Lockstep is your company's decision memory: a record that writes itself, an approve button for the person who owns each call, and a check that flags work contradicting a decision before it ships.
What counts as a decision
Anything your company agrees to that later work should respect. A rule in a product spec: “Guest checkout must not ask for a login code before payment.” A policy agreed in Slack: “Refunds over $500 need manual review.” An engineering call made in a code review: “Refunds now process nightly in one batch.” Decisions like these get made all day, in different tools, by different people. Then they live in someone's head.
What Lockstep does with one
Take Priya, a product manager, and her spec rule about the login code. Four things happen. Captured: when her spec moves to review, Lockstep spots the rule and drafts a decision, linked to the exact paragraph it came from. Approved: Priya gets it in Slack and makes it official with one click. Nothing counts until a human says so. Briefed: every person and every AI agent who works on checkout starts already knowing the rule. Defended: weeks later, when another team's change would break the rule, both teams get flagged during code review. Before launch, not after.
What Lockstep is not
It is not a wiki: nobody writes pages. It is not a project tracker: it does not manage tasks. And it is not another place to file things: if your team has to remember to use it, it has already failed. Lockstep reads from where work already happens and only ever writes back a Slack message or a code review comment.
Who uses it today, and what is next
Today, Lockstep enforces decisions where code ships, because AI agents made forgetting expensive there first. The memory itself takes decisions from anywhere: pricing calls, support policies, product rules. Enforcement beyond code is where we are headed, and we will say so plainly when it arrives.
Lockstep is open source (Apache 2.0) and can run on your own servers. We are onboarding a small number of design partners. Curious how it works under the hood? Read the engineering tour.
Common questions
- Is Lockstep a documentation tool?
- No. Documentation tools give you a place to write things down. Lockstep writes decisions down for you, gets each one approved by its owner, and then delivers and defends them. Nobody files anything.
- Does Lockstep change the tools my team uses?
- No. It reads from the tools where your company already decides: Slack, Notion, Jira, Google Docs, and code reviews. Approvals happen with one click in Slack or the dashboard.
- What is an AI coding agent?
- Software like Claude Code or Cursor that writes and edits code from instructions. Agents are fast and capable, but every session starts blank: they never heard your company's decisions unless something briefs them. Lockstep does that briefing.
- What is drift?
- Drift is work that contradicts a decision you already made. Lockstep flags it during code review, before it ships, and shows both teams the two decisions that collided.