spine

Spine is the ledger that agent sessions file into: which sessions are open, on which plan, holding which files, and what became of each task. It is a single SQLite file, an MCP server over stdio that reads and writes it, and two small command-line tools for backing it up and sweeping it.

It records; it does not act. No tool in it runs a command, writes a file or touches a repository. A file claim is a declaration that makes a collision visible, not a lock that prevents one. A session that was never closed is marked reaped — the sweep saw a dead process, not an outcome — and is never marked completed or abandoned on its behalf.

Where things are

• README — what spine is, how to run it, how the MCP tools map to the modules, the

licence, and the measured state of the repository on the day the README was last verified.

• MCP tool reference — every tool the server publishes, with its parameters. Generated

by asking the running server for tools/list, not by reading its source.

Status

Private and pre-1.0. The code was extracted from the substrate repository on 2026-09-02 with its commit history preserved; the copy inside substrate is still the one live sessions talk to, and nothing has been cut over. The repository, Portll/spine, is private until that is sorted out.

Zero runtime dependencies: node:sqlite and the standard library, Node 22.5 or later.

Licence

The Spine Evaluation Licence — evaluation on hardware you control, nothing else. It is the same licence substrate carries. The full text is in the repository's LICENSE; the README quotes what it permits.