Forge is an orchestration layer that sits between AI coding tools and your codebase. It's a single Rust binary (~3 MB, zero runtime deps) that runs as an MCP server over stdio. Any MCP-compatible AI tool can call it.
What it does: - File locking: When an agent claims a task, Forge locks the target files. Other agents see the lock and work on something else. Conflicts become structurally impossible. - Knowledge flywheel: Agents call forge_capture_knowledge to store decisions, patterns, and gotchas. Other agents query the store before making decisions. Knowledge compounds across sessions instead of evaporating. - Drift detection: Sends recent changes + the project spec to an LLM for alignment scoring. Catches "you were supposed to build auth but you're refactoring CSS" before it compounds. - Governance: 5-dimension health check (tests, security, docs, architecture, git hygiene) that agents and humans can query at any time.
The brain is pluggable: a free heuristic engine (pattern matching, works offline) or an LLM engine (GPT-4.1 by default). Switch with one CLI command.
State is a single JSON file in .forge/ — human-readable, git-trackable, zero operational overhead.
51 tests (30 unit, 9 CLI, 12 MCP protocol), 0 compiler warnings, 0 unsafe blocks.
MIT licensed. Whitepaper with the full architecture: https://nxtg.ai/insights/forge-whitepaper
Happy to answer questions about the Rust implementation, MCP protocol design, or the multi-agent coordination problem in general.
