Tincan

Tincan keeps important development memory in workspace-local Markdown. It helps developers and agents preserve context without recording every action.

• Plan: the small, living list of intended outcomes.
• Journal: meaningful progress, decisions, learnings, open questions, and next steps.
• Decision: an accepted choice that should guide future work.
• Learning: an evidence-supported conclusion worth reusing.

Install

Tincan requires Rust 1.85 or newer. Git is optional unless you use changes.

cargo install tincan-cli
tincan skill install

From a source checkout, use cargo install --path .. After updating the CLI, the next interactive Tincan command offers to update stale installed skills.

Quick start

tincan init C:\path\to\workspace
cd C:\path\to\workspace

tincan plan
tincan decide "Load full media details on demand" --file web/app/page.tsx
tincan learn "Paging did not reduce rendering work" --evidence "Release trace"
tincan journal --done "Implemented the compact gallery read model" `
  --decision "Load full media details on demand" `
  --planned "Add the stale-response regression test" `
  --next "Start with the stale-response test"

tincan resume
tincan search "gallery"
tincan summary
tincan changes

Commands find the nearest parent .tincan/. One workspace can therefore contain zero, one, or several Git repositories. Pass -d <path> or --directory <path> to start discovery from another directory.

Storage

.tincan/
|-- config.toml
|-- plan.md
|-- decisions/
|-- learnings/
|-- journal/
`-- AGENT_GUIDE.md

When the workspace is inside Git, Tincan excludes .tincan/ through Git's local exclude file. A non-Git parent is already outside its nested repositories. Markdown is canonical, and people or agents can edit record bodies and the plan directly.

See the user guide or run tincan --help.