Surfaces
There's one record, reached four ways. Agents read and write it through the plugin or any MCP client; you read it in the web dashboard and drive it from the CLI. They all see the same graph at the same time, so a change one of them makes is immediately context for the others.
The web dashboard
Where people read the record. The dashboard shows the graph, tasks, knowledge, documents, and objectives , and the links between them , so you can see the project being built alongside the code rather than buried inside it. It updates live: when an agent claims a task or writes a decision, you watch it land.
Working with a team
A project's record is shared, not personal. Invite teammates and everyone reads and writes the same live graph, so what one person's agent learns is immediately context for the next. Tasks belong to the project rather than an individual, and claims are atomic, so two people (or two agents) never start the same work by accident. Whether you're solo today or a small team, the record is the common ground everyone builds on.
The CLI
stele is a single binary that handles sign-in, project setup, and a full read/write surface over the graph, on par with what agents can do. It's also how you run the local web server and manage your account. Most days your agent calls it for you, but it's there when you want to drive the record directly or script against it.
The CLI reference covers the full command surface.
The plugin, for agents
The plugin is how an agent's harness talks to Stele. It's two things working together:
- An MCP server that exposes the graph as tools the agent can call: reading context, creating tasks, writing knowledge, following links. When it runs locally, it can also verify an Operator task against trusted local Git state without accepting a worker's account of what changed.
- Lifecycle hooks that run automatically: one injects relevant prior knowledge on every prompt, others watch what files you read and keep the record fresh across a session.
The same plugin renders into each harness's native shape at install time: slash commands in Claude Code and Cursor, skills in Codex, Antigravity, and Copilot, a marketplace plugin in Grok Build, plugins in OpenCode and Kimi Code CLI, and a native TypeScript extension in Pi with prompt templates, compact recall receipts, and claimed-task status in the terminal , so the experience fits the tool you're already in.
Beyond the supported harnesses, any MCP-compatible client can connect to the Stele server directly and walk the same record, including agents that don't touch code at all.
The local MCP server is free on every plan; hosted MCP is available from Pro upward. Graph operations work through hosted MCP. Operator's oracle-integrity checks, execution-evidence attempts, and final commit binding need local repository access, so they run through local MCP or stele loop verify and stele loop attempt/finalize. Hosted MCP fails closed instead of pretending it inspected, executed, or rechecked local files.
The assistant
Built into the dashboard is an assistant that answers from your project's live graph. Ask it where things stand, why a decision was made, or what's blocking a release, and it walks the record to answer, citing the tasks and knowledge it drew on, so you can open them yourself. It's the fastest way for someone without an agent open to interrogate the project.
The assistant can act on the record as well as answer from it, and for anything that changes what the record shows by default, it checks with you first. Hiding a node is one of those; so is bringing a hidden one back, since un-hiding re-exposes something someone chose to make invisible.
