The institutional memory your codebase never had.
GitOracle is an AI archaeologist for git repositories. It reads your commit history the way a historian reads primary sources — finding the why behind architectural decisions, mapping who holds critical knowledge, surfacing hidden technical debt, and answering "what would have happened if..." questions.
Built with the gitagent standard. Powered by gitclaw.
When engineers leave, the code stays. The reasons for the code leave with them.
- Why is the auth module structured this way?
- Who understood the payment service best before the team changed?
- What tech debt did we ship under deadline pressure and forget about?
- We almost did it a completely different way in Q2 — what happened to that approach?
Git has the answers. Nobody reads git like this.
GitOracle does.
| Skill | What It Does |
|---|---|
git-archaeology |
Recover the narrative arc of how any file or module evolved |
knowledge-mapper |
Map expertise concentration, bus factor, and knowledge risk |
debt-detector |
Find hidden technical debt from churn, crisis, and deadline patterns |
decision-historian |
Reconstruct why architectural decisions were made |
counterfactual |
Analyze paths not taken — reverted PRs, abandoned branches |
- Node.js 20+
- An Anthropic API key
- A git repository to analyze
# Install gitclaw
npm install -g gitclaw
# Set your API key
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-..."
# Run GitOracle against any repo
gitclaw --dir . "Analyze this repo's git history and give me a knowledge map"# Who knows what in this codebase?
gitclaw --dir /path/to/repo "Run the knowledge-mapper skill on the src/ directory"
# Why does the auth module look the way it does?
gitclaw --dir /path/to/repo "Use git-archaeology on src/auth/index.ts"
# Where is the hidden technical debt?
gitclaw --dir /path/to/repo "Run debt-detector on this entire repository"
# Why did we choose PostgreSQL over MongoDB?
gitclaw --dir /path/to/repo "Use decision-historian to find when and why we chose our database"
# What almost happened instead?
gitclaw --dir /path/to/repo "Use counterfactual to analyze our most significant reverts"git clone https://github.com/open-gitagent/gitagent
export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="sk-ant-..."
gitclaw --dir . "Analyze the gitagent repo's git history. Who has the deepest knowledge of the compliance features? What decisions shaped the spec?"GitOracle runs read-only git commands — git log, git blame, git show, git diff — and interprets the output with deep historical context from its knowledge base. It never writes to, commits to, or modifies any repository.
Every finding is grounded in specific commit hashes, dates, and authors. GitOracle does not speculate beyond what the history shows — but it interprets what the history means.
gitoracle/
├── agent.yaml # Manifest
├── SOUL.md # Identity: archaeologist, not linter
├── RULES.md # Hard constraints: read-only, cite evidence
├── DUTIES.md # Role boundaries: observer, not actor
├── skills/
│ ├── git-archaeology/ # Recover the "why" from commit history
│ ├── knowledge-mapper/ # Map expertise and bus factor risk
│ ├── debt-detector/ # Find hidden debt in churn and crisis patterns
│ ├── decision-historian/ # Reconstruct architectural decisions
│ └── counterfactual/ # Analyze paths not taken
├── memory/runtime/context.md # Cross-session memory
├── knowledge/git-patterns.md # Pattern reference (crisis, debt, churn thresholds)
└── tools/git-query.yaml # Read-only git tool schema
npx gitagent validate
npx gitagent info
npx gitagent export --format system-promptGit history is the most underused artifact in software engineering. Teams spend thousands of dollars on documentation that goes stale, wikis that nobody reads, and onboarding sessions that can't scale. Meanwhile, every architectural decision, every crisis response, every moment of technical debt acknowledgment — all of it is sitting in the git log, waiting to be read.
GitOracle reads it.
gitagent Hackathon — April 2026
Built with:
MIT