About

Atlas is a navigation manifest for multi-repo projects. It sits as a sibling to your product repos and tells AI agents which repos belong to which product, what context matters, and who's working on what right now, so parallel agents don't step on each other.

Why we built it

The moment you point an AI agent at a real codebase with more than a handful of repos, two problems show up. First, the agent can't tell which repos are actually in scope for the task, and it wastes context wandering through unrelated code. Second, as soon as you run a second agent in parallel, both can edit the same file with no awareness of each other.

Atlas solves both. The manifest scopes the agent to the relevant product's repos. The claim and release layer prevents collisions with TTL-based locks and path-level granularity, and an MCP server exposes the same operations to any MCP-capable client.

Design principles

• Reference, never invent. Atlas points at scripts and configs that already live in each repo. The repo stays the source of truth for how to run itself; atlas is the cross-repo index.
• Cooperative, not enforced. Claims are advisory locks. TTLs cap them. Conflicts are user-visible events: agents tell the human, they don't silently retry or override.
• Local-first, cloud-later. The free tier runs entirely on a developer's machine with no auth, no server. The cloud tier is for teams who need shared state across multiple machines.
• Open by default. MIT-licensed. Source on github.com/cidx-dev/atlas. Issues and PRs welcome.

Read the documentation to install and get started, or jump straight to the source.