- It gets context automatically. At some points in a session, Alike gives your agent short notes about the work: decisions, related tasks, and other sessions on the same branch. See When Alike adds context.
- It can ask Alike. Your agent can call Alike’s MCP tools to search your past sessions, read a decision, log what it is working on, or ask a teammate a question. See MCP tools.
What to ask
Start work
“I’m starting on the
fix-login-timeout branch. What does Alike know about this work?”Recall a decision
“Why did we pick token rotation over long-lived tokens? Check Alike.”
Search past sessions
“Find the session where I debugged the webhook retries last week.”
Record a decision
“Record in Alike that we use one queue per tenant, and that we rejected a shared queue because of noisy neighbours.”
Plan the day
“What’s on my plate today? What should I pick up next?”
Check on teammates
“Is anyone else working on the billing migration right now?”
- “Where did Alike get this decision from?” The agent reads the item’s sources, for example the session, email, or issue.
- “Get the full Alike brief for this work again.” Use this after the agent’s context was compacted. When the agent links the same work again, it usually gets only a short update with what changed.
The first time your agent uses Alike
After your first Alike tool call, Alike asks the agent to greet you and to show one or two things that need your attention. The agent then offers to log what you work on. If nobody else in your workspace uses Alike, it can offer to invite a colleague. This happens once in each workspace.When Alike adds context
Alike adds context at these points. Not every agent supports every point. See Supported agents.
Alike tries not to show the same item twice in one session.
What the context looks like
Alike wraps its context in a block that your agent can recognize:(confirmed) were confirmed by a person. Items without the mark were inferred by Alike from your sessions and sources.
Do you see this context?
Usually not. Alike gives the context to the agent, not to you. Two exceptions: in Cursor, a follow-up at the end of a turn appears as a new message in the chat. In Copilot CLI, Alike adds its context to your prompt. The agent tells you when Alike’s context changes what it does, for example: “Per Alike, the team decided…”. If you want to see what Alike knows, ask the agent: “What did Alike tell you at the start of this session?”Log your work
Alike works best when your agent logs what it works on. The agent does this without asking you, because it records only your own work.- Starting: the agent links the session to a work item, for example the git branch, the GitHub pull request, or the Linear issue. If no item exists, it creates one.
- Deciding: when you choose an approach and reject an alternative, the agent records a decision. Later sessions that touch the same code get that decision. See Decisions.
- Finishing: the agent updates the task status and ends the work focus.
Work across many sessions
You can run several agent sessions at the same time. Each session can see your other live sessions, and send them a message. The message arrives when the other session starts or ends its next turn. No confirmation is needed, because all the sessions are yours. Example: “Tell my other session on theapi-refactor branch that the schema changed.”
See Run parallel sessions.
Messages to other people
Alike tells your agent to ask you before it sends anything to another person: a question to a teammate, an update, a reply, or a suggested change to a teammate’s task. Alike does not block these sends. Only invitations wait on Alike’s side until you confirm. See Work with teammates.If Alike is slow or down
Your agent does not wait for Alike. If Alike does not answer within a few seconds, the hook stops and the agent continues without Alike’s context. After a few network failures in a row, the session-start and prompt hooks stop calling Alike for some minutes. The other hooks keep trying, but each one stops after a few seconds. If your machine’s credential stops working, the agent receives this message at session start or with your next prompt:Alike auth expired — run `npx @alikeai/setup --doctor` . Run the command to pair again.