Itaca

The problem

Every time I switched project, the agent spent the first ten minutes rebuilding context: what repo this is, what it runs on, where we left off. The information already existed, spread across package files, config and my head. Project dashboards never work because nobody updates them.

How it works

A scan finds every project under your folders and detects services with small rules written in YAML, one file per service, about ten lines each. Anything that can be derived from the code is recomputed on every scan, so it can't go stale. The only thing written by hand is the narrative: what's happening and what's next, kept in a file inside the repo.

One command installs it into Claude Code: a hook that puts a short briefing in context when a session starts, and another that asks the agent to update the status when there are new commits since the last one.

Small on purpose

Auto-generated context files tend to make agents worse, not better, so the MCP server exposes three tools and every output has a token budget. The briefing stays under 40 lines and CI fails if it grows.

Values in .env files are only used to recognise services and never printed. A test with sentinel values makes sure of it.