Agentic Task System (ATS)

ats is an MCP server and CLI that gives your AI agent memory from the task system you already use — TickTick, Taskmaster, Beads, Obsidian, Notion, GitHub, Airtable, Google, or all at once via the composite adapter. It fuses retrieval across adapters with Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) and layers on portable intent, typed task links, lifecycle validity, scoped access, an action ledger, and bounded task events. Works with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any MCP client.

Adapter, not migration. Most "agent memory" projects build a new store that drifts the moment you stop feeding it. But you already curate a knowledge base by hand every day — your task app. ATS makes that context agent-native without re-homing a single note. It's task-first: the task is the spine; supporting docs (GitHub issues, Notion specs) fuse in as context behind it — not a second-brain/PKM tool.

npm install -g @reneza/ats-cli @reneza/ats-adapter-ticktick
ats config use ticktick
ats auth login
ats find "deployment runbook"

How it compares

Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea is right about the destination, wrong about the starting line: almost nobody's knowledge lives in clean markdown — it lives in the task app they've used for years. ATS closes that gap with pluggable storage adapters.

What you get

• A two-way bus. The agent reads a task's title, body, tags, dates, and checklist; it writes results back where you'll see them.
• First-fetch relevance. Parallel hybrid retrieval (dense + sparse + keyword, RRF-fused, with provenance) collapses "search → refine → search again" into one fetch.
• Durable typed links. One agent attaches a decision / depends-on / output / supersedes link; a later agent in a fresh context receives it via ats context. The handoff lives in the task app, not a chat log.
• Execution context. ats intent captures outcome/why/done-when; ats lifecycle keeps stale context from steering current work; ats security scopes actions and audits allow/deny; ats ledger records what an agent did and whether the task advanced; ats promote turns exploration into a committed goal; ats hierarchy evaluate checks local work still supports its parent.
• Bounded events. ats events watch --json emits deterministic task.created/updated/completed/... NDJSON, spooled 0600 with pending/ack recovery and stable dedup IDs. ATS only emits observations — a consumer still evaluates intent, validity, and security before acting.
• Task graph for agents. Tasks become structured nodes with proof, writeback, review, lifecycle, and link edges instead of free-form memory text; see docs/task-graph-for-agents.md.
• Session-index handoff. Coding-agent session browsers can keep raw transcript analytics while ATS stores the durable task-linked summary; see docs/agent-session-index.md.
• Curated at write time. Every item is hung on a "trunk" (a theme like writing, client-work) the moment it's captured, so retrieval has structure to grab.

Metadata lives in flat YAML frontmatter on the task body, typed links in ## Related, consulted sources in ## References. Writes are add-only — ATS never drops a row or link a human added. npm run prove:intent runs a deterministic synthetic proof of the full path.

Walkthrough: from a task pile to the next action

Three tags steer everything — do: (agent or you), type: (build/research/review), effort: (S/M/L):

1. Capture into the system you already use.
2. Tag each task do: / type: / effort:.
3. Link dependencies: ats link add <task> <blocker> --type depends-on.
4. Let bd ready pick the unblocked frontier — you never scan the backlog.
5. Do it, then close. Closing recomputes the frontier; the next right thing surfaces on its own.

Deploy it yourself

The operator deck (phone app) runs free on Cloudflare Pages; the backend runs on Render — one click builds the MCP server plus a private search memory (Qdrant) and embedding engine (Ollama).

After deploy, copy the auto-generated ATS_MCP_TOKEN from the ats-mcp service's Environment tab, point your MCP client at https://<your-mcp-url>/mcp with header Authorization: Bearer <ATS_MCP_TOKEN>, and set TICKTICK_ACCESS_TOKEN to read your real tasks. Prefer your own machine or a VPS? Same pieces as plain Docker containers — see the deploy guide.

Available adapters

Every vendor ships an MCP connector now, so your agent can reach Notion, GitHub, and your task app — but not retrieve ("what do I know about the auth migration?", ranked across all of them). That's the layer ATS adds: hybrid RRF ranking, one query across every source (the composite adapter fuses them into one deduped list), top-k instead of token dumps, and the credential stays scoped inside the adapter.

Per-adapter auth and mapping live in each package's README. PRs welcome — scaffold and verify against the contract:

ats adapter new linear              # writes ats-adapter-linear/ (six stubs)
ats adapter test ./ats-adapter-linear   # pass/fail/skip per contract check

CLI surface

# Lifecycle
ats init|config use|auth login|doctor <adapter>   # setup, switch, auth, health check

# Retrieval  (any read command takes --json for piping to jq / agents)
ats find <query> [--explain]       # parallel + RRF + provenance — DEFAULT
ats open|url <id-or-title>         # deep link / paste-ready cross-reference
ats get <id-or-title> [--extract raw|json|yaml]
ats links <project> <task>         # resolve deep-links in a task body
ats hybrid <query> | ats similar <id>   # when embeddings exist

# Authoring
ats create "<title>" [--content ..][--project <id>]
ats update <project> <task> [--content ..][--title ..]

# Agent execution context (portable across adapters)
ats intent set <project> <task> --outcome ".." --done-when "a,b"
ats promote <src-proj> <src-task> <target-proj> --outcome ".." --done-when "a,b"
ats hierarchy set|evaluate <project> <task>
ats lifecycle set <project> <task> --status active --valid-until 2026-12-31
ats link add|remove <src-proj> <src-task> <dst-proj> <dst-task> --type decision
ats graph|context <project> <task>
ats ledger record <project> <task> --action release.verified --advanced true
ats security set|check <project> <task>
ats events snapshot|watch|pending|ack   # NDJSON observations; never launches agents

# Ops
ats bench run|score|progress|analyze-usage
npm run prove:intent|prove:taskmaster|prove:beads|prove:progress

Use it from any MCP client (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, OpenCode)

@reneza/ats-mcp exposes the active adapter as a tool set spanning retrieval, CRUD, and execution context (find, get_task, create_task, set_task_intent, add_task_link, resolve_task_links, context_for_task, record_action, undo_write, poll_task_events, and more). For Claude Code this is persistent memory between sessions with no new database: the agent recalls runbooks, decisions, and project state from the task app you already keep current.

ATS speaks MCP over stdio, so any client that can launch a stdio MCP server works. Only the config file and the wrapper key differ; the binary (ats-mcp) and its ATS_ADAPTER env are the same everywhere.

# Claude Code
claude mcp add ats -e ATS_ADAPTER=@reneza/ats-adapter-ticktick -- ats-mcp

// Claude Desktop / Cursor / Windsurf — identical `mcpServers` shape
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ats": { "command": "ats-mcp", "env": { "ATS_ADAPTER": "@reneza/ats-adapter-ticktick" } }
  }
}

// OpenCode (opencode.json) — local stdio server, note `command` is an array
{
  "mcp": {
    "ats": {
      "type": "local",
      "command": ["ats-mcp"],
      "environment": { "ATS_ADAPTER": "@reneza/ats-adapter-ticktick" },
      "enabled": true
    }
  }
}

Install the binary on PATH first (npm i -g @reneza/ats-cli), or use an absolute path to ats-mcp if your client does not inherit your shell PATH.

Conventions

• Wiki project. A designated project (default Permanent Notes) holds durable knowledge; others hold ephemeral tasks.
• Agent-data notes = a note whose body has a fenced json / yaml block, extracted via ats get <title> --extract json.
• Cross-references = adapter-native deep links — generate with ats url <title>, don't hand-write.
• Full pattern: docs/wiki-conventions.md.

State integrity

ATS holds the line where agent systems fail: writes round-trip without lossy re-encoding, the store → Task mapping is contract-tested, and every result carries its provenance (sources, find --explain). A publish-safety gate (check-no-pii.mjs) fails the build if personal data could leak into a package. Full note: docs/state-integrity.md.

For the agent-side operating model, see docs/task-graph-for-agents.md: task text is the human projection, but the execution layer needs structured links, proof commands, review requirements, and writeback targets.

Working on ATS

Contributions welcome — bug fixes and especially new adapters under packages/adapter-*. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the dev setup and adapter pattern, and AGENTS.md if you drive a coding agent over the repo. Working on the source, pi-codegraph gives your agent a call-graph of the monorepo — the adapter pattern and the blast radius of a core change — so it stops re-reading the whole tree each session.

Versioning & license

v0.9: reversible writes (ats undo / undo_write from a ledger before-image), forward/dangling links that back-resolve on target creation (add_task_link --allow-missing, resolve_task_links), Obsidian path-traversal hardening, and verified stdio config for Cursor, Windsurf, and OpenCode. Built on v0.6-v0.8: portable intent, exploration promotion, goal hierarchy and conflict evaluation, bounded task events, and the Taskmaster/Beads adapters. See CHANGELOG.md. MIT.

If ATS is useful, consider a ⭐ — it helps others find it.