Project Lore – Authority-aware documentation retrieval for coding agents

[tamas-fm]

Pre-submission Checklist

• This post follows the MCP community guidelines

What would you like to share?

Project Lore MCP – Documentation-aware context for coding agents

Hi everyone!

I've just open-sourced Project Lore, a local-first MCP server that helps coding agents find the right project documentation before making changes.

Most documentation retrieval tools treat every Markdown file equally. In practice, projects usually have architecture documents, ADRs, design docs, runbooks, READMEs and notes that differ significantly in authority, scope and freshness.

Project Lore tries to model that.

Some of the ideas behind it include:

• Task-to-document routing
• Authority-aware retrieval
• Document relationships
• Provenance for returned context
• Freshness and staleness metadata
• Ambiguity detection when multiple documents cover the same topic

It's completely local-first, read-only, uses SQLite + full-text search, and currently exposes three MCP tools:

• route_task
• search_project_knowledge
• get_document_context

The goal isn't to replace code search or code-indexing tools like codebase-memory-mcp, but to complement them. Code tells an agent how something works; project documentation explains why it exists, what constraints apply, and which decisions should guide changes.

This is the initial public release (v0.1.1), so I'd really appreciate feedback.

In particular, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on:

• Is the authority model useful, or would you model documentation differently?
• Are there documentation sources or formats that should be supported next?
• Does the task-routing approach make sense?
• Are there MCP tools or workflows you'd like to see added?
• How do you think something like this should integrate with existing code-indexing or memory MCP servers?

I'd love to hear any ideas, criticism, or feature requests. Thanks!

Relevant Links

GitHub:
https://github.com/tamas-fm/project-lore-mcp

npm:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/project-lore-mcp

MCP Registry:
https://registry.modelcontextprotocol.io/