Selvedge

Long-term memory for AI-coded codebases.
A git blame for AI agents — but for the why, not just which line which
model touched. Captured live, by the agent, as the change happens.

Six months ago, your AI agent added a column called user_tier_v2. You don't
know why. git blame points to a commit from claude-code with a generated
message that says "Update schema." The session that made the change is long
gone — and so is the prompt that produced it.

With Selvedge, you run this instead:

$ selvedge blame user_tier_v2

  user_tier_v2
  Changed     2025-10-14 09:31:02
  Agent       claude-code
  Commit      3e7a991
  Reasoning   User asked to add a grandfathering flag for legacy free-tier
              users during the pricing migration. Stores the original tier
              so we can backfill discounts without touching billing history.

That reasoning was captured by the agent in the moment — written into
Selvedge from the same context that produced the change. Not inferred from
the diff afterward by a second LLM. Not a hand-typed commit message.

Who Selvedge is for

Selvedge has two audiences. Same tool, same pip install, same SQLite
file under .selvedge/. Different scale of pain.

Teams running long-term, AI-coded codebases.
When the project is big enough that you (or someone else) will touch it
again in six months, twelve months, three years — but most of it was written
by an agent whose context evaporated the day each PR shipped. git blame
tells you what changed. Selvedge tells you why — even after the agent
session, the prompt template, the developer who asked for it, and the model
version are all long gone. This is the original use case: production
codebases, schema decisions, migrations, dependency changes that need an
audit trail that survives turnover.

Solo developers using Claude Code on everyday projects.
Side projects, weekend builds, the small internal tool you keep poking at.
You don't need enterprise governance — you just need to remember why you (or
your agent) did the thing you did yesterday, last week, last sprint. Run
selvedge init once. Add four lines to your CLAUDE.md. From then on,
selvedge blame is muscle memory — a way to talk to your past self when
your past self was an LLM.

If you've ever come back to your own AI-built project and thought "what was
this for again?", Selvedge is the missing piece.

The problem

Human-written code leaks intent everywhere — commit messages, PR descriptions,
inline comments, the Slack thread that preceded it. AI-written code doesn't.
The agent has perfect clarity about why it made each decision, but that
context lives in the prompt and evaporates when the conversation ends.

Six months later, your team is debugging a schema decision with no trail.
git blame tells you what changed and when. It can't tell you why.

Selvedge captures the why — live, by the agent itself, as the change is
made. The diff is git's job. The why is Selvedge's.

What's new in v0.3.2

An observability-polish release. No new feature surface — the focus is
making existing functionality discoverable and debuggable, plus locking
in WAL/busy_timeout assumptions across SQLite versions.
Drop-in upgrade for anyone on 0.3.1.

selvedge doctor. A single health-check that walks the ambient state
agents typically run into and reports each row PASS / WARN / FAIL / INFO:
which DB path is being resolved (and which precedence step matched —
SELVEDGE_DB, walkup, or global fallback), whether .selvedge/ exists,
whether the schema is at the latest migration version, whether the
post-commit hook is installed and not silently failing, last tool_calls
timestamp (proxy for "is the agent wired up?"), and whether
SELVEDGE_LOG_LEVEL is set to a recognized value. Exits 1 on any FAIL,
so doctor can be wired into CI. --json for machine-readable output.

$ selvedge doctor
Selvedge doctor

  Check                  Status      Detail
 ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  Database path          i INFO      ~/.selvedge/selvedge.db  [via SELVEDGE_DB env var]
  .selvedge/ directory   ✓ PASS      ~/.selvedge
  Schema version         ✓ PASS      at v2 (latest)
  Post-commit hook       ✓ PASS      ~/code/myapp/.git/hooks/post-commit
  Last hook failure      ✓ PASS      no failures recorded
  MCP wiring             ✓ PASS      last tool_call at 2026-04-25T14:21:08Z
  SELVEDGE_LOG_LEVEL     i INFO      unset (defaults to WARNING)

All checks passed.

Post-commit hook no longer fails silently. The previous hook silently
died when selvedge wasn't on the PATH that git launched (a common
symptom under macOS GUI git clients with stripped PATHs). The new hook
appends a single line to .selvedge/hook.log on failure, and both
selvedge status and selvedge doctor surface the most recent failure.
Old hooks keep working — re-running selvedge install-hook upgrades to
the new wrapper.

selvedge stats upgrades. The coverage report now breaks calls
down per-agent so you can catch the case where claude-code is logging
changes but cursor is only querying history. A separate
missing_reasoning count surfaces stored events whose reasoning fails
the quality validator — empty, too short, or a generic placeholder the
agent shipped despite the warning.

Pinned-SQLite CI matrix. A new CI job builds SQLite 3.37.2, 3.42.0,
and 3.45.3 from source and runs the suite against each via LD_PRELOAD,
locking in WAL + busy_timeout behavior across the SQLite versions
selvedge users are most likely to be on. The Python matrix also gains
3.13.

What's new in v0.3.1

A hardening release — no new feature surface, but Selvedge is now safe to
run in long-lived agent pools that hammer the database from multiple threads.
Drop-in upgrade for anyone on 0.3.0.

Concurrent writes no longer blow up. Every storage write is wrapped in
a database is locked retry with exponential backoff, on top of WAL mode
and a 5-second PRAGMA busy_timeout. The new tests/test_concurrency.py
spawns 8 threads writing 25 events each and asserts all 200 land — that
test reliably failed before this release.

Real schema versioning. The previous try: ALTER TABLE ... except: pass
pattern has been replaced with an explicit schema_migrations table that
records every applied migration with version, name, and timestamp. Partial
failures roll back atomically. Pre-versioning databases are bootstrapped
without re-running DDL.

Structured logging. Set SELVEDGE_LOG_LEVEL=DEBUG (or INFO,
WARNING, ERROR) to see what's happening inside the storage and
migration layers. All library modules log under the selvedge.*
namespace — entry points configure a stderr handler at startup.

Public API surface. Library users can now import the supported
surface from the top-level package:

from selvedge import (
    SelvedgeStorage, ChangeEvent, ChangeType, EntityType,
    get_db_path, parse_time_string, check_reasoning_quality,
)

The frozen surface is locked in by tests/test_public_api.py — accidental
removals fail CI.

MCP protocol smoke tests. A new test suite boots the real
selvedge-server subprocess and round-trips every tool over the actual
JSON-RPC stdio transport. Catches contract drift the in-process tests miss.

CI gates. ruff, mypy, and an 85% coverage floor are now enforced
on every PR. Current coverage is 92%.

One sneaky regex fix. The reasoning-quality validator's ^fixed?$
pattern was supposed to match "fix" and "fixed" but actually matched
"fixe"/"fixed" — the ? only made the trailing d optional. Same bug
in the add, remove, update, change, and see ... patterns.
Rewritten as ^fix(?:ed)?$ etc. Reasoning placeholders that slipped
through before now get flagged.

See CHANGELOG.md for the full list and reasoning.

How Selvedge compares

There's a fast-growing "git blame for AI agents" category. Here's where
Selvedge fits — and where it deliberately doesn't.

Why "captured live" matters. AgentDiff and Origin generate reasoning
after the change is made, by feeding the diff back to a second LLM call.
Selvedge's reasoning is the agent's own intent, written from the same
context window that produced the change — no inference, no hallucinated
explanations, and an empty reasoning field is itself a useful signal
(the agent didn't have one).

Why "entity-level" matters. Most tools attribute lines. Selvedge
attributes things you actually search for: users.email,
env/STRIPE_SECRET_KEY, api/v1/checkout, deps/stripe. The first
question after git blame is usually "what's the history of this column",
not "what's the history of lines 40–48 of users.py".

Why "changesets" matter. A Stripe billing rollout touches the users
table, two new env vars, three new API routes, one dependency, and four
functions across the codebase. Tag every event with changeset:add-stripe-billing
and you can pull the entire scope back later — even if the original PR was
broken into eight smaller ones over a month.

Selvedge ↔ Agent Trace. Agent Trace
(Cursor + Cognition AI, RFC Jan 2026, backed by Cloudflare, Vercel, Google
Jules, Amp, OpenCode, and git-ai) is an emerging open standard for AI
code attribution traces. Selvedge isn't a competitor to it — it's a
compatible producer. The design for selvedge export --format agent-trace
is at docs/agent-trace-interop.md. Agent
Trace is the wire format. Selvedge is the live capture + query layer that
emits it.

Install

pip install selvedge

Quickstart

1. Initialize in your project

cd your-project
selvedge init

2. Add to your Claude Code config

~/.claude/config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "selvedge": {
      "command": "selvedge-server"
    }
  }
}

3. Tell your agent to use it

Add to your project's CLAUDE.md:

You have access to Selvedge for change tracking.
Call selvedge.log_change immediately after adding, modifying, or removing
any DB column, table, function, API endpoint, dependency, or env variable.
Set `reasoning` to the user's original request or the problem being solved.
Set `agent` to "claude-code".
Before modifying an entity, call selvedge.blame to understand its history.

4. Query your history

selvedge status                        # recent activity + missing-commit count
selvedge diff users                    # all changes to the users table
selvedge diff users.email              # changes to a specific column
selvedge blame payments.amount         # what changed last and why
selvedge history --since 30d           # last 30 days of changes
selvedge history --since 15m           # last 15 minutes ('m' = minutes)
selvedge changeset add-stripe-billing  # all events for a feature/task
selvedge search "stripe"               # full-text search
selvedge stats                         # log_change coverage report
selvedge install-hook                  # auto-link commits to events
selvedge import migrations/            # backfill from migration files
selvedge export --format csv           # dump history to CSV

How it works

Selvedge runs as an MCP server. AI agents in tools like Claude Code call
Selvedge's tools as they work — logging structured change events to a local
SQLite database.

Each event records:

• What changed (entity path, change type, diff)
• When (timestamp)
• Who (agent, session ID)
• Why (reasoning — captured from the agent's context in the moment)
• Where (git commit, project)

The diff is git's job. The why is Selvedge's.

Entity path conventions

users.email           DB column (table.column)
users                 DB table
src/auth.py::login    Function in a file (path::symbol)
src/auth.py           File
api/v1/users          API route
deps/stripe           Dependency
env/STRIPE_SECRET_KEY Environment variable

Prefix queries work everywhere: users returns users, users.email,
users.created_at, and any other entity under the users. namespace.

MCP tools

When connected as an MCP server, Selvedge exposes:

CLI reference

selvedge init [--path PATH]               Initialize in project
selvedge status                           Recent activity summary
selvedge diff ENTITY [--limit N]          Change history for entity
selvedge blame ENTITY                     Most recent change + context
selvedge history [--since SINCE]          Browse all history
              [--entity ENTITY]
              [--project PROJECT]
              [--changeset CS]
              [--summarize]
              [--limit N]
selvedge changeset [CHANGESET_ID]         Show events in a changeset
                  [--list]                or list all changesets
                  [--project NAME]
                  [--since SINCE]
selvedge search QUERY [--limit N]         Full-text search
selvedge stats [--since SINCE]            Tool call coverage report (per-tool, per-agent)
selvedge doctor [--json]                  Health check: DB path, schema, hook, MCP wiring
selvedge install-hook [--path PATH]       Install git post-commit hook
                     [--window MIN]       (default 60 minutes)
selvedge backfill-commit --hash HASH      Backfill git_commit on recent events
                        [--window MIN]    (default 60 minutes)
selvedge import PATH                      Import migration files (SQL / Alembic)
              [--format auto|sql|alembic]
              [--project NAME]
              [--dry-run]
selvedge export [--format json|csv]       Export history to JSON or CSV
              [--since SINCE]
              [--entity ENTITY]
              [--output FILE]
selvedge log ENTITY CHANGE_TYPE           Manually log a change
             [--diff TEXT]                CHANGE_TYPE: add, remove, modify,
             [--reasoning TEXT]           rename, retype, create, delete,
             [--agent NAME]               index_add, index_remove, migrate
             [--commit HASH]
             [--project NAME]
             [--changeset CS]

All read commands support --json for machine-readable output.

Relative time in --since:

• 15m → last 15 minutes (m = minutes)
• 24h → last 24 hours
• 7d → last 7 days
• 5mo → last 5 months (mo or mon = months)
• 1y → last year

Unparseable inputs (e.g. --since yesterday) exit with a clear error
rather than silently returning empty results. ISO 8601 timestamps
are also accepted and normalized to UTC.

Configuration

Coverage checking

Wondering how often your agent actually calls log_change? Two ways to check:

# Quick summary in the terminal
selvedge stats

# Cross-reference against git commits
python scripts/coverage_check.py --since 30d

The coverage script compares your git log against Selvedge events and shows
which commits have associated change events. Low coverage usually means the
system prompt needs strengthening — see docs/fallbacks.md for guidance.

Contributing

git clone https://github.com/masondelan/selvedge
cd selvedge
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest

See CLAUDE.md for architecture details and the phase roadmap.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.