mex vs Trellis
A living wiki for your codebase, written by your coding agents: a Tree-sitter graph grounds structured Markdown notes, task-aware routing loads only what's needed, and drift checks catch stale claims. — versus — Spec, task and memory layer that lives in your repo: .trellis/ holds conventions, PRDs and journals, auto-injected each session — one workflow across 20 coding-agent platforms.
Two in-repo memory conventions for coding agents. Trellis is spec- and task-shaped — conventions, PRDs and journals in `.trellis/` across 20 platforms; mex is knowledge-shaped, with a router, a code graph and drift checks. Process memory versus codebase memory.
| mex | Trellis | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 1.5k | 14k |
| Forks | 104 | 783 |
| Language | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Last activity | yesterday | 4 days ago |
| Topics | code-intel, memory | coding, memory |
| Curated connections | 4 | 5 |
mex — the curator's take
The answer to the instruction file that grew to 2,000 lines: knowledge lives in a routed `.mex/` wiki instead of one giant prompt, claims can be grounded to exact graph nodes by fingerprint, and `mex check` validates paths, commands, links, indexes and symbols spending zero tokens before `mex sync` sends the agent to repair only what drifted. Code stays the source of truth; the wiki is its maintained explanation. Limits worth knowing: the deterministic graph covers TypeScript/TSX, JavaScript/JSX, Python and Rust, so a polyglot monorepo outside that set gets a thinner spine — and the wiki is only as good as what your agents write into it, so it needs review like any other docs.
Trellis — the curator's take
Attacks the right problem — agents restart from zero every session — with the boring, durable fix: files in the repo, not a memory service. Team-shared specs are the real moat; one engineer's hard-won rules compound for everyone. It's opinionated though: the 4-phase loop (brainstorm → implement → check → update-spec) only pays if the team actually adopts the process — half-adopted, .trellis/ rots into stale paperwork. AGPL-3.0: fine to use, but check your company's license policy. Skip it for weekend projects; this is process overhead that needs a team to amortize.