Lovelace - Project management that lives in your repo, built for agents

I founded Adaca a decade ago and today we build software with 150+ engineers. Over the past year more and more of that building happens through AI coding agents, and I kept hitting the same wall: the agents work inside the repository, and the project tracker lives somewhere else entirely. Every session meant pasting a ticket into a prompt, letting Claude work, then walking back to the tracker to explain what happened.

That's how Lovelace was born: a desktop app where tickets, docs, and agent session records are Markdown files inside your repo, and Claude works the same files through MCP.

Story to date:

Three weeks ago I pointed Lovelace at its own repository, and it has managed its own development ever since: 139 tickets and 144 agent session records, most of them written by Claude. This week it went public. (If you remember an earlier Lovelace from a previous post of mine, an online IDE: the name survived, the product changed shape.)

Features 🔥

• 📋 Kanban board and list view generated from your schema - define your own ticket types, fields and statuses, and the columns, filters and forms follow
• 📝 Ticket pages with a block editor and a timeline of the comments, sessions and commits that touched the ticket
• 📚 A docs tree in the repo (ADRs, guides, plans) plus a graph of the wiki-links between everything
• 🤖 8 MCP tools for Claude, every write validated against your schema
• 🧭 Fresh sessions start oriented - a hook injects a ~1,500 token digest of in-progress tickets and recent session records
• 🛑 A stop hook makes Claude write a session record before finishing, and a guard hook blocks direct edits to ticket files
• ⏱️ Live presence on the board, with an elapsed timer while Claude works

What makes Lovelace different:

• Files are the source of truth. Hand-edit anything and the app re-validates live; a broken file gets you an error with file and line, never a crash.
• Local-first, for real. No server, no database, no account, no telemetry. The update check is the only network call the app makes.
• The history is public proof. Every ticket and session record that built Lovelace is in the repo, including a bug it filed against itself.
• Free and open source (AGPL-3.0).

Demo 🚀

Download for macOS, Linux and Windows at lovelace.co, or read everything, tickets included, at github.com/lovelace-co/lovelace.

What should a project remember that your tracker doesn't? I'd love to hear what you'd build into it, thank you :)