Align CLI

Your AI agents know the code. They don't know the company.

The decisions behind the code live in commits, tickets, chat and meetings. Months later nobody can tell what still stands, what conflicts, or why. Align pulls them into one graph your agents check before they build.

curl -fsSL https://align.tech/install.sh | sh
align

That is the whole thing. The first time you run it, align asks which coding agent you use, connects your tools and builds a local graph on your machine. After that, align opens your agent with the graph already wired in.

A standalone binary. No Node, no npm, nothing else to install, and local-only mode works fully - on-device embeddings included, running on a WASM backend bundled inside the binary. Linux, macOS and Windows, x64 and arm64, glibc and musl. It checks the download against the release's own checksums and says so out loud when it cannot, and you can read install.sh before you pipe it anywhere.

Prefer npm, or already have Node? npm install -g @aligndottech/cli (Node 22.16+). Binaries for every platform are on the releases page.

On Windows, start with npm. In PowerShell:

npm install -g @aligndottech/cli
align

The curl ... | sh line above needs a POSIX shell, so it runs under Git Bash or WSL and not in PowerShell itself. Installing covers the rest, including the manual binary download for a Windows machine with no Node on it.

MIT. No account needed. Beta, pre-1.0.

Run it inside a git repository. --local seeds the graph from your commit history, so you have something to ask about straight away, and your decisions stay in a SQLite file on your machine. Your decisions and code never go to Align. It sends anonymous usage counts, and tells you so once, before the first one. align telemetry off or DO_NOT_TRACK=1 stops all of it, and nothing is sent from CI. What touches the network, and every field.

Working with a team? Team graphs are separate from the local one. Run align login, then align setup: a work email lands you in your company's graph (first person in is the admin, the next colleague on that domain joins it automatically), and setup connects your tools through read-only OAuth and wires up your editors. A personal email does not get a cloud graph; solo use is the local graph that align builds. A team login is never switched to local behind your back: align setup --env local builds the local graph on purpose and leaves the login alone.

How it works

  Your tools                      Align                       Your agents & you
  ──────────                   ───────────                  ───────────────────
  Git, GitHub, GitLab  ─┐                                  ┌─ align ask "why…"
  Jira, Confluence      ├─▶  import  ─▶  decision graph ─┐ ├─ MCP server (inline)
  Linear, Notion        │    (read-only) (what/why/who)  ├─┤  edit hooks (any agent)
  Slack, Teams, Zoom   ─┘                  + relationships┘ └─ align check (CI)

1. Import pulls decisions out of the tools you already use. Read-only, nothing is modified.
2. Align links them into a decision graph: what was decided, why, who decided it, and how decisions relate (supersedes, conflicts with, depends on).
3. Your agents query and check against it, over MCP, an edit hook, CI, or align ask.

Your agent checks before it writes

align setup wires Align in four ways, so context fires whether or not the model thinks to ask.

The hook is non-blocking and fail-open. It never denies an edit by default, and if Align is missing, slow or unreachable the edit proceeds untouched. It needs no AI provider key.

Cursor and Codex CLI can't do the pre-edit hook, and that's a limit of those hosts. They get the other three. Full per-host matrix: docs/agent-hooks.md.

The first time Claude Code loads a project with a committed hook, it shows a one-time "approve hooks" prompt. Accept it to enable automatic alignment.

Everyday commands

align                                # set up, or see your graph and what to do next
align ask "how does our auth work"   # natural language answer with sources
align ask src/auth/session.ts        # a file path finds decisions about that file
align connect                        # pick a source to import: git, docs, jira, github, ...
align connect jira --token ...       # one source, straight in
align check                          # check your staged diff against the graph
align mcp --setup                    # wire your agent to the graph

That is the whole of align --help. Every other command (search, decisions, export, ratify, push, context, local, ...) still works and is listed in docs/commands.md.

Inside your coding agent, the agent writes the answers - align needs no AI key for that. Only align ask in the terminal writes prose itself, and without a provider it returns the matching decisions as a ranked list. The first time that happens on a terminal, align ask offers to add a key you already have (Anthropic, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Gemini, Groq, Mistral, xAI) or a free Groq key (no card, ever). A local Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint works too, and align ai picks which one is used when you have several. Setting one up.

Docs

Why bother

In a published benchmark, giving a coding agent recorded product decisions took decision compliance from 46% to 95% (Dillon & Varanasi, arXiv:2605.08112 - a small vendor study, 8 tasks and 41 decision points, and it isn't our data).

Wiring context into an agent is the easy part, and this repo is the open-source version of it. The hard part is the record underneath: what your team actually decided, across every tool, kept current.

Want a hand setting it up? I do free 30 minute setup calls: https://calendly.com/tom-align/setup

License

MIT, see LICENSE. The CLI and MCP server are open source, along with the connector SDK. The hosted gateway is a separate commercial service.