Lore: Repurposing Git Commit Messages as a Structured Knowledge Protocol for AI Coding Agents

TL;DR

Lore is a protocol that transforms git commit messages into structured decision records, capturing reasoning and constraints to preserve institutional knowledge for AI coding agents, without requiring extra infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces Lore, a lightweight, git-native protocol for structuring commit messages as decision records, enhancing knowledge retention for AI coding workflows.

Findings

Lore effectively captures decision context within commit messages.

The protocol is compatible with existing git workflows and tools.

It outperforms five competing approaches in formal comparisons.

Abstract

As AI coding agents become both primary producers and consumers of source code, the software industry faces an accelerating loss of institutional knowledge. Each commit captures a code diff but discards the reasoning behind it - the constraints, rejected alternatives, and forward-looking context that shaped the decision. I term this discarded reasoning the Decision Shadow. This paper proposes Lore, a lightweight protocol that restructures commit messages - using native git trailers - into self-contained decision records carrying constraints, rejected alternatives, agent directives, and verification metadata. Lore requires no infrastructure beyond git, is queryable via a standalone CLI tool, and is discoverable by any agent capable of running shell commands. The paper formalizes the protocol, compares it against five competing approaches, stress-tests it against its strongest objections, and outlines an empirical validation path.