montology

Your codebase's vocabulary, enforced — and your agents can't drift it. Words and rulings live in a database; a tree-sitter scan checks every named thing your code declares against them — classes, structs, functions, types, modules, protocols — across twelve languages; a pre-write hook corrects your coding agent before drift ever lands.

montology reads what your code already declares — every named thing in Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Swift, Java, Ruby, Elixir, C and C++ (and, where there is a UI, the Tailwind theme and the CSS) — and turns it into an ontology with a gate: drift fails CI with the file, the line, and the repair. It is a vocabulary layer for all of your code, not a styling tool; a repo with no UI in it uses every part of this except the last.

# the CLI
uvx --from "git+https://github.com/shinyobjectz/montology#subdirectory=.monty/cli" monty init

# the agent skill (Claude Code, Cursor, and friends)
npx skills add shinyobjectz/montology

# npm (the launcher)
npm install -g montology

Sixty seconds to a drift report

cd your-repo
monty init            # .monty/, agent wiring, the pre-write guard hook
monty explain         # the X-ray: what this repo is, in one pass
monty scan --candidates   # the words your code is already asking for
monty lint            # the gate — every finding carries its repair
monty config          # what the gate enforces, and how to change it
monty intake ask …    # no words yet? the agent's `intake` skill asks the team
                      # in a form, round by round, and ends in a glossary

FAIL collision: struct 'Harness' at Sources/Runner.swift:14 is the word
     'harness' — "the thing that runs a scenario end to end". Rename it,
     or record the exception: monty onto except harness --where … --why …
FAIL divergence: type 'RowID' is declared as String (db/rows.ts:8) and as
     Int (api/rows.ts:12) — one noun, two things
warn retired: 'pointer' was RENAMED to 'cursor' (the word moved when the
     UI stopped owning it). Name it 'cursor' — the old name stays retired.
note design: rogue color #121212 ×2 (first at css/app.scss:37)
     — nearest token: ink #1b1b1f (Δ31)

Every finding names the file, the line and the repair. The first three are about the CODE — a struct wearing a word that means something else, a type declared as two different things, a name a ruling retired — and the last is the same contract applied to a hex code, which is a word that means one thing. If your repo has no UI you will never see that line.

Where there IS a UI, the same machinery goes further: monty design recipes mines the class strings your markup repeats (flex flex-wrap gap-2 items-center ×102 — on shadcn/ui's own repo) so they can become named things.

Related MCP server: engineering-standards

The firewall: your agent cannot write drift

Everything above is post-hoc. The guard runs before the write: monty init installs a pre-write hook in every harness it wires (merge-safe — .claude/settings.json and .cursor/hooks.json), and the plugin ships its own, so a plugin install is guarded without an init. It lints every proposed Write/Edit/NotebookEdit against the ontology in milliseconds — a declaration named after a retired word (renames are rulings; always blocks), a collision with an enforced word, a rogue hex when tokens exist. Deny is exit 2 with the repair on stderr: the harness feeds it straight back to the model, which corrects and retries. The agent physically cannot introduce a second gray or resurrect a renamed concept — it gets the token or the current word handed to it mid-edit. The guard fails open (malformed payload, no workspace, any internal error → allow silently) so it can never break an editor; humans in vim never meet it. monty doctor says, per harness, whether it is actually wired; monty config guard.names block|warn|off tunes it.

monty explain — the one-shot conceptual X-ray

Point montology at any repo cold: one command composes the declared surface, the vocabulary it has, the vocabulary it is asking for (with definitions drafted on the atomic tier when one serves — law-checked, refused over wrong), where meanings actually gather (semantic clusters vs the directory tree's claimed architecture: cross-cutting concepts, grab-bag directories), the design system as measured, and every place the repo contradicts itself — straight to the terminal, because an instrument prints findings, it does not decorate them.

The part that keeps you: words

A repo's concepts drift exactly like its colors. montology's vocabulary is a database, not a doc — one word, one meaning, a one-line test, an optional dotted code — rendered into a generated agent skill and enforced against every declaration tree-sitter can parse (python, ts/tsx, js, go, rust, swift, elixir, ruby, java, c, c++):

monty onto check thread        # FREE / TAKEN / RULED — before naming ANYTHING
monty scan --candidates        # the words your codebase is asking for
monty onto add thread "a stateful user↔agent session" --code atl.thread --pos noun
monty onto amend thread --definition "…" --why "a later ruling narrowed it"
monty lint                     # collisions (advisory by default), code-tree
                               # integrity, stale prose — each with its repair

Not every symbol sharing a word's name is drift, and treating them alike produces a list nobody reads. A word carries what it names — verb, noun, or value type — and the judgment follows from it: Store.open is English doing ordinary work below the surface, while a noun answering for a second thing is the failure a vocabulary exists to prevent. A collision you keep is a recorded decision, in the database with the rest of the vocabulary:

monty onto except open --where "lib/**" --why "ordinary work below the surface"
monty onto except --drafts     # what an old [scan] allow list would become

What an exception can never do is silence a divergence — one value-typed word declared as two different values (@type name :: term() in one module, @type name :: %{…} in another). That is a separate law with a separate line: an exception says a symbol may share the name, not that the name may mean two things.

Rulings end arguments permanently: overloads ("say cell, not sandbox"), collisions with frameworks (whose word it is, who moved), and renames — the old name retires, old material stays readable, and monty migrate old new --apply propagates the rename through the code by token (tree-sitter positions, strings and comments untouched, losslessly round-trippable — proven on eight real repos).

When a ruling narrows a word you already authored, monty onto amend corrects the record in place: the name and its history stay, every field that changes is ledgered with the text it replaced, and an unknown name or a no-op is refused. Editing the database around the authoring path is the same drift the gate exists to catch.

Meaning over time

Three instruments make a repo's meaning a tracked quantity:

• monty vitals — the pulse: gate state, vocabulary state, design state, guard compliance → one verdict (TENDED / DRIFTING / UNTENDED) with every reason carrying its repair — plus whether the firewall is wired and the org upstream it inherits. --json is the dashboard shape; --strict exits 1 unless TENDED, so a repo can gate on its own tending. Track it per repo the way you track CI.

• monty drift — the telescope: the git history sampled into lexicon, palette and convergence curves (--csv for the research lane). On excalidraw's full history the palette fragmented ~10× in two years (4→11→27→42 distinct colors) while declarations merely doubled. Flask's concept lexicon: 49 concepts in 15 years, flat since 2019.

• monty guard --stats — repair-following, measured: every hook denial followed by a clean edit within 30 minutes is a complied denial.

Semantic hearing

The string laws enforce one word, one meaning. The [semantics] extra hears the dual — one meaning, one word — with POTION static embeddings (~30 MB, numpy-only; no torch, no runtime): monty onto audit flags two words defined into the same idea, local words that duplicate inherited org words under different names, candidates that are secretly existing words, and owner groupings that don't match where meanings cluster. Advisory permanently — a cosine score proposes, only a ruling decides.

One ontology, every repo

The org's vocabulary is authored once — any montology workspace's .monty/ontology.db is the artifact — and inherited everywhere:

monty init --from git@github.com:acme/ontology.git    # or a path, or a .db URL
monty onto pull                                       # refresh from the pin

Upstream rows refresh on every pull; local words always survive; a name defined in both places is a loud conflict (local wins — reconcile deliberately). When the org renames a word, every repo's next pull prints the exact monty migrate command: that is how a rename crosses the fleet.

The two models it carries (and the ones it refuses)

montology is deliberately near-modelless — the deterministic laws do the enforcing — but it carries exactly two, each chosen for a measured floor:

Nothing heavier ships, ever: no torch, no onnxruntime, no bundled weights. The host agent (Claude, Cursor, Codex) is always the best drafter available, and the gate never needs a model at all.

For agents

monty init wires the repo for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex (merge-safe: sections are appended, JSON keys merged, global config never touched) — MCP server, the instructions section, and the pre-write guard hook in each harness's own dialect. monty doctor reports which of those actually landed.

Two skills ship: montology routes the work (new repo → set up, empty vocabulary → build one, working repo → the check-first contract), and intake runs the guided walkthrough for a codebase whose words were never written down. The generated words skill carries the whole vocabulary — words, tokens, recipes, rulings, doctrine — tiering into reference pages rather than truncating when it outgrows its budget.

The MCP server exposes ontology_check, ontology_add, ontology_amend, ontology_rule, ontology_similar, ontology_words, ontology_lint, scan_surface, scan_candidates, structural_search, repo_explain, repo_vitals and workspace_config. Prose is rendered from the database, never authored; a stale render fails the build.

Under the hood

tree-sitter (via tree-sitter-language-pack) measures declarations and CSS structurally; ast-grep (invoked, one static binary) powers structural pattern search; SQLite holds the vocabulary. The stress battery (stress/run.py, weekly in CI) proves four properties on eight real repos — flask, excalidraw, gin, ripgrep, phoenix, sinatra, spring-petclinic, redis: merge-safe idempotent init, zero-error parsing, truthful collision reporting, and lossless migrate round-trips.

The taxonomy library

62 public ontologies and taxonomies, licence-verified, grouped by domain. Browse with monty onto sources [group].

core — any business, any industry

health & life sciences

finance

retail & e-commerce

advertising & media

agriculture & food

environment & climate

software & infrastructure

security

AI, ML & data science

geography

trade & occupations

research & information

general knowledge

Contributors

git clone https://github.com/shinyobjectz/montology && cd montology
uv sync && just              # the action surface
just check                   # the gate (montology lints itself, strictly:
                             # its own toml sets collisions = "enforce")