Crosslink

The missing memory layer for AI-assisted development.

AI coding assistants forget everything between conversations. Crosslink gives them persistent memory — sessions, handoff notes, issue tracking, and breadcrumbs that survive context compression and session restarts.

Why Crosslink?

Every time an AI assistant's context window fills up or you start a new conversation, the AI loses all context about what it was doing, what's done, and what's next. You end up repeating yourself, re-explaining decisions, and watching the AI redo work.

Crosslink solves this with a local-first issue tracker designed specifically for AI workflows: sessions with handoff notes, breadcrumb tracking that survives context compression, and multi-agent coordination for parallel AI work.

Quick Start

# Install
cargo install crosslink

# Initialize in any project (interactive TUI walkthrough)
crosslink init

# Start a session — see what the last AI left you
crosslink session start

# Create + label + start working in one step
crosslink quick "Fix auth token refresh" -p high -l bug

# Record breadcrumbs (survives context compression)
crosslink session action "Found root cause in refresh_token()"

# End with handoff notes for the next session
crosslink session end --notes "Fixed token refresh. Dark mode is next."

Features

Core Issue Tracking

• Session memory — Handoff notes, breadcrumbs, and session state survive restarts
• Local-first — All data in SQLite (.crosslink/issues.db), no cloud, works offline
• Smart workflow — quick command, next recommendations, tree visualization
• Subissues & dependencies — Break tasks down, track blocking relationships
• Time tracking, milestones, archiving — Full project management in the CLI
• Templates — Built-in templates for bugs, features, refactors, and research

Multi-Agent Orchestration

Crosslink coordinates multiple AI agents working in parallel on the same codebase.

• Distributed locking — Agents claim issues via a shared git coordination branch, preventing conflicts
• Agent identity — Each agent gets a unique ID and SSH signing key (crosslink agent init)
• crosslink kickoff — Launch background agents in isolated git worktrees (local tmux or container)
  • Design doc-driven: pass --doc to generate implementation plans from a design document
  • kickoff plan — Read-only gap analysis against the codebase before committing to a build
  • kickoff report — Spec validation reports from completed agents
  • Pre-flight checks for required external commands with platform-specific install guidance
• crosslink swarm — Multi-agent swarm coordination across phased builds
  • swarm init — Initialize a swarm plan from a design document
  • swarm plan — Plan multi-phase builds across budget windows with cost estimation
  • swarm launch — Launch all agents for a phase
  • swarm gate — Run the test suite as a phase gate before proceeding
  • swarm checkpoint — Record progress after a phase completes
  • swarm resume — Reconstruct state and continue after a budget cap or session restart
  • Budget-aware scheduling with configurable window duration and model cost tracking
• Container execution — Run agents in isolated Docker containers (crosslink container)

Knowledge Management

Shared documentation synced across agents via a dedicated git branch.

• crosslink knowledge — CRUD for markdown knowledge pages with YAML frontmatter
• Full-text search — knowledge search across all pages
• Bulk import — knowledge import from existing markdown files or design documents
• Auto-injection — Relevant knowledge pages injected into agent context automatically
• Conflict resolution — Accept-both merge strategy for concurrent knowledge edits

Behavioral Hooks & Rules

Claude Code hooks that enforce code quality and workflow discipline.

• Issue tracking enforcement — Hooks block code changes without an active crosslink issue
• No-stubs policy — Post-edit hooks detect TODO, FIXME, unimplemented!() stubs
• Drift detection — Adaptive reminders when agent behavior drifts from project norms
• Tracking modes — Strict, normal, and relaxed enforcement (crosslink workflow)
• Language-aware rules — 20+ language-specific rule files auto-injected based on project languages
• House style — crosslink style syncs project conventions from a central git repo
• Local overrides — rules.local/ directory for gitignored per-machine rule customizations

Terminal Dashboard

crosslink tui

Read-only interactive terminal UI built with ratatui:

• Issues tab — Tree view, detail view, filtering, and sorting
• Agents tab — Active session monitoring with heartbeat status
• Knowledge tab — Page browser with syntax highlighting
• Milestones & Config tabs — Project overview at a glance
• Mouse support, command palette (Ctrl-P), clipboard export, keyboard help (?)

Other

• SSH signing — Agent key generation, per-commit signing, allowed_signers management
• Driver intervention tracking — crosslink intervene logs human corrections for agent improvement
• Typed comments — Comments carry kind (plan, decision, observation, blocker, resolution, result)
• Clock skew detection — Uses git commit timestamps as witness to detect time drift
• Context measurement — crosslink context measures and optimizes context injection overhead
• Configurable git remote — Use any remote for hub/knowledge branches, not just origin
• Works everywhere — CLI + VS Code extension + context provider for any AI agent

Installation

Requires Rust 1.87+ (install rustup).

# From crates.io
cargo install crosslink

# From source
git clone https://github.com/forecast-bio/crosslink.git
cd crosslink/crosslink && cargo install --path .

Also available as a VS Code extension.

Documentation

• Quick Start — Get running in under a minute
• Session Workflow — Deep dive into session management
• Kickoff: Autonomous Agents — Launch background agents in worktrees
• Swarm Orchestration — Multi-agent phased builds from design documents
• Container-Based Agents — Run agents in isolated Docker containers
• Knowledge Management — Shared research pages synced via git
• Terminal Dashboard — Interactive TUI for browsing issues and agents
• Multi-Agent Coordination — Distributed locking for parallel AI work
• Claude Code Hooks — Behavioral guardrails for AI coding
• Tracking Modes — Strict, normal, and relaxed enforcement
• CLI Reference — Full command reference
• Hook Configuration — Customize enforcement behavior
• Rules Customization — Edit behavioral rules
• Kickoff Report Schema — Agent validation report format

Development

cargo test          # Run tests
cargo clippy        # Lint
cargo fmt           # Format

License

MIT