Backfill
Stele is most useful on a project that already has history. Backfill seeds the record from what you've already built — the code, the git history, the docs, the issues — so a fresh graph starts full instead of empty. Your own agent does the reading; Stele coordinates it and stores what it finds.
Who does the reading
This is the part to be precise about: Stele doesn't crawl your repo on a server. Backfill runs inside the agent you already use, on your machine. When you start it, your agent takes the role of orchestrator and spawns a wave of focused, cheap-model "missions" — each one reads a different source and reports back what it found. Nothing leaves your machine except the findings you approve.
Backfill is an agent-driven flow, not a magic importer. It reads what you point it at, fact-checks its own findings against the code, and asks for your approval before it writes. Facts it can't tie to a source are dropped rather than guessed.
What it reads
Each mission specializes in one source, so the findings come back sourced and specific rather than vague:
- The code — the structure of the system and the components it breaks into.
- Git history — the decisions and reversals written into commits over time.
- Issues & pull requests — the problems that came up and how they were resolved.
- Documentation — design notes and READMEs already in the repo.
- Past agent sessions — the reasoning from earlier work with your agents.
How a run goes
You stay in control the whole way. Backfill checks in before it gathers, before it spends on a model tier, and before it writes — so you decide the scope, not it.
Every node it writes carries its provenance — where the fact came from — so you can trace any backfilled decision back to the commit, issue, or file it was drawn from. From there the record behaves like any other: it's served back on prompts, and it ages and gets verified like knowledge you write by hand.
Run it
Backfill is part of /stele:start — on a project with history, it offers to seed the record as the first step. You can also ask for it directly:
Backfill this project into Stele. Read the code, the git history, and the docs, fact-check what you find, and show me the findings before inserting anything.
On a large repository you can scope the first run to the part you're actively working in, then widen it later. Backfill adds to the record; it never overwrites what's already there.