letopis/zavet
zavet · the second book

Agents forget why. Your repo shouldn't.

Every decision behind your agent-built code, captured as a byproduct of the work — living in .zavet/, where the next agent run has to read it.

Ships with dira — install free
$ zavet why src/billing/rounding.ts
DEC-0142 · rounding to 0.1h, never 0.25h
decided 12 Mar · 3 sessions · 4h 12m engaged
guard: active · 2 agent reverts blocked
HOW ZAVET WORKS

Capture. Enforce. Recall.

Documentation dies because it's a separate chore. zavet records decisions where the work already happens — in commits and sessions.

01
Capture

A decision is written when it is made — from a commit trailer, a session summary or one command. No wiki page to remember, no review meeting to schedule.

02
Enforce

Guards attach a decision to the files it governs. When an agent quietly reverses it three weeks later, the run is stopped and told why — before the diff exists.

03
Recall

Ask the codebase why. Every answer carries its date, its author, the sessions that produced it and the commits that implemented it.

THE JOIN · ONLY IN DIRA

Every decision has a cost. Every regression prevented has a value.

Because zavet lives inside dira's session tracking, each decision is correlated with the sessions that produced it. No wiki can do that arithmetic.

DEC-0142 · cost
4h 12m engaged across 3 sessions · €315 of supervised time
DEC-0142 · value
2 agent reverts blocked · ~6h of rework never happened
ZAVET VS. THE WIKI

Knowledge bases store what you wrote. None of them stop an agent.

Confluence, Notion and AI knowledge tools live outside the repo — agents never read them before editing, and nothing enforces a word of them.

A wiki page is prose in another tab. A guard is a rule in the working tree.
A generated spec is a plan the next agent run can rewrite to agree with itself.
zavet ships in the repo, is read before the edit, and refuses the reversal.
ANNEX IV · TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION

Annex IV asks for your design rationale. You wrote it in March.

Annex IV wants the design choices and the reasoning behind them, per system. Written in August about March, that is fiction with a timestamp.

See the full mapping →

Ask your codebase why.

zavet ships with dira — one install, works fully offline.

Next — proba →