/LEH-jee/ · is legible · an open specification

Legible to everyone
working in it.

Leji defines the shared context layer of AI-native teams: one versioned, repo-owned record of how a team thinks (domain language, constraints, decisions, conventions, guardrails). People and AI agents read it on every task; changes pass the same governance gate.

Read the spec Quickstart
I

Intent over instructions

Most AI adoption writes imperative, per-vendor instructions. Leji captures durable intent (what things mean, what must hold, why it is so) and lets people and agents derive actions from declared intent plus task context.

II

A circle, not a tier

Human-to-human, human-to-AI, and human-to-AI-to-human are first-class flows around one shared context layer. Equal access, not equal authority: everyone reads, anyone proposes, people approve.

How most teams do it: a tier People author Per-vendor instruction files a copy per agent host, a fork per team Agents consume One direction, written for agents. Knowledge stays in heads and threads; staleness is invisible until output breaks. Leji: a circle shared context layer People People Agents Agents human-to-human · human-to-AI · human-to-AI-to-human Everyone reads; anyone proposes; people approve. Staleness is felt and fixed.

Adopt by degrees

Partial adoption is by design. Four conformance levels, each containing the last.

  1. coremanifest, boot profile, real content, a first decision, a named owner.
  2. indexeda generated index and a machine-readable changelog: a tooling run.
  3. governedreview-gated changes, agent profiles, CI on the mechanics.
  4. federatedone context layer across a multi-repo org, pinned, with sibling context layers intact.

One manifest file

leji.json at the repository root is the machine entrypoint: it declares the context root, the boot profile, the category mappings, and the conformance claim. Your existing docs/ tree conforms by mapping, not by renaming.

The cleanest context layer needs no vendor files at all: invocation points the agent host straight at the boot profile, zero hops. Vendor entrypoints (CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .cursor/rules) are the fallback for cold starts; any you must keep becomes a one-line redirect, never a home.

Manifest reference

{
  "leji": "1.0",
  "name": "your-team-context",
  "rootPath": "docs/",
  "bootProfilePath": "docs/boot-profile.md",
  "categories": {
    "domain": { "paths": ["docs/business/"] },
    "system": { "paths": ["docs/architecture/"] },
    "decisions": { "paths": ["docs/decisions/"] }
  },
  "agents": {
    "thought-partner": "docs/agents/thought-partner.md"
  },
  "owners": {
    "primary": { "name": "A. Named Owner" }
  },
  …
}