Switch agents without losing the project
Plan with one agent. Build with another. Hand off when a quota fills. The project should not reset because you changed tools.
The continuity gap
Most teams that ship with AI agents do not live in one harness. You might sketch with ChatGPT, implement in Claude Code, then jump to Codex when a limit hits. Each tool is fine at its job. The project context is what falls on the floor between them.
Native IDE or harness memory, when it exists, usually stays inside that vendor’s wall. Claude’s project memory is for Claude. Cursor’s is for Cursor. Switching tools means starting cold, or pasting a summary and hoping it was complete.
One record, several doors
Stele is a shared project record: decisions, lessons, risks, and tasks in one graph. Agents reach it through the plugin (MCP server plus hooks) or any MCP-compatible client. People read the same graph in the web app. The CLI can drive it directly. A change one surface makes is context for the others.
The harness list Stele ships against today includes Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity, Copilot, OpenCode, Grok Build, and Kimi Code CLI, plus MCP clients generally. The point of that list is not “every tool forever.” It is that the memory layer is not owned by one coding agent’s product.
What that looks like in a week
Monday you plan a change and leave decisions and open tasks in Stele. Tuesday a different agent claims the task, reads the linked decisions and risks before it edits, and writes a lesson when something fails. Wednesday you are on another machine without the repo open: you still reach the hosted record from the web app, create a task, or ask where things stand. The coding agent that picks the work up later sees the same task and the same knowledge.
Tasks belong to the project, not to a person. Claims are atomic, so two agents do not grab the same work by accident. That is coordination on top of memory, not a replacement for your issue tracker.
When one harness is enough
If you truly live in a single tool and never hand work across agents or people, native memory may cover you. Stele is for the case where the project outlives a session, a quota, and a particular vendor’s sidebar.