Never reconstruct where you left off. Local-first continuity for coding agents — resume, decisions, and residue git cannot see. CLI, MCP, and Agent Skills.

Git records what changed. Chat history fades. Mental records the small amount git cannot explain: current focus, consequential decisions, and attention residue still in the air after a hop.

Challenge

Coding agents reconstruct intent from transcripts and status files. That does not survive a two-week gap, a host switch, or a parallel session. The missing layer is a local continuity log — not a task manager and not a cloud transcript store.

Solution

We built Mental as a local-first CLI that agents call with --json:

  • Heartbeat: Cheap reload of resume, residue, and open decisions without dumping journals into context.
  • Decisions and attention: Why a fork was chosen, and what is still in the air, as searchable files — not chat memory.
  • MCP and Agent Skills: The same CLI is available to hosts that cannot shell out, without making MCP required.
  • Private by default: The store lives in the home directory. Nothing secret, nothing committed.

Results

Mental CLI is the continuity layer Balacode agents use on this site and across the rest of the studio's repos.