lore-example

A tiny demonstration of lore — version control for intent, not code.

This repository contains no website. It contains the intent that produces one. The actual site lives in code/, which is deliberately .gitignored: in lore, code is build output and the intent is the source. You regenerate the code by materializing the intent and handing it to a coding agent.

What it builds

Four commits of intent, each a phase in the life of a little page with three balls in a horizontal row:

Phase	Intent	Result (left → right)
1	Three balls in a row, all blue	🔵 🔵 🔵
2	Make the rightmost ball red	🔵 🔵 🔴
3	Swap the rightmost and leftmost balls	🔴 🔵 🔵
4	Make the rightmost ball green	🔴 🔵 🟢

The final materialized state is 🔴 🔵 🟢. Run lore log to see the four phases.

Use it

1. Install lore

curl -fsSL https://lorevcs.com/install.sh | sh

(or, with Rust already installed: cargo install --git https://github.com/lorevcs/lore)

2. Clone the intent from lorehub

lore clone https://hub.lorevcs.com/lore/lore-example
cd lore-example

This pulls the committed intent — every prompt and decision — over lore's own hosting. There is no website yet; you generate it in the next step.

3. Materialize the intent and pass it into Claude

lore materialize | claude

lore materialize prints the brief — the complete, chronological record of every prompt and decision in this repo. Piping it into claude (Claude Code) lets the agent reconcile the working tree to match the brief: it writes the website to code/index.html. Open that file in a browser and you should see 🔴 🔵 🟢.

Prefer a single argument? claude "$(lore materialize)" does the same thing.

Explore the history

Because each phase is its own commit, you can materialize any point in time and rebuild just that version of the page:

lore log                                  # list the four phases, newest first
lore materialize --ref <commit>           # print the brief as of that phase
lore materialize --ref <commit> | claude  # rebuild that phase's page

For example, materializing the Phase 2 commit yields 🔵 🔵 🔴.

How it works

• .lore/ holds the committed intent (prompts, notes, decisions). This is what's version-controlled.
• code/ holds the generated website — .gitignored, never committed, always rebuildable from the intent.
• AGENTS.md (dropped by lore init) tells the coding agent to record intent before it writes code.

The same brief can produce different bytes each time it's materialized — lore reproduces behavior, not exact files, the way two engineers given one spec write two programs that pass the same tests.

See lorevcs.com for the full story.