Agents

Strata is built to be driven by an agent. The MCP server is in the binary rather than beside it, the docs answer offline and version-matched, and every page on this site has a markdown twin. You need the binary and nothing else.

Connect over MCP

The Model Context Protocol server ships inside strata. It speaks newline-delimited JSON-RPC over stdio and logs to stderr, so it drops into any MCP client that can run a command.

strata --db ./mydb mcp serve

Point a client at that. The shape is the same everywhere; this is the usual JSON block, with the database path as the argument you change.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "strata": {
      "command": "strata",
      "args": ["--db", "/absolute/path/to/mydb", "mcp", "serve"]
    }
  }
}

Why there are so few tools

Strata has 135 commands and the server does not offer 135 tools. It offers a crafted handful. Every tool definition a server advertises is spent from the model's context before it reads the task, so a server that hands over its entire surface has made the model worse at using it.

So the set covers the path an agent actually walks, and one escape hatch reaches the rest: a tool that runs any command in the catalog by name. Nothing is unreachable, and the common work costs a short list rather than a long one.

Ask the server what it has rather than reading a list here. It answers tools/list with the current set, which moves between releases, and identifies itself as strata at the version you installed.

Set up a repository

Two commands write the files a coding agent looks for. Both are safe to run in a repository that already has them; neither overwrites differing content without --force.

strata agents init

Writes .strata/AGENTS.md. With --apply it also appends a pointer block to the repository's own AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md, so an agent already reading those finds Strata without being told.

strata agents skill --write --for all

Installs the Strata skill for the agents that support one: .claude/skills/strata/SKILL.md, .cursor/rules/strata.mdc, and a marker-delimited section in AGENTS.md for Codex. Pass --for claude, --for cursor or --for codex to install just one. Without --write it prints the skill to stdout.

Ask the binary

The installed binary answers the same questions this site does, without a network and matched to the version in front of you. Each of these prints and exits.

  • strata agents guide

    The complete usage guide, as markdown, matched to the installed version.

  • strata agents commands --json

    The command catalog: every command with its access, batch and commit facets.

  • strata agents errors --json

    The error registry: every code with its retry policy and commit outcome.

That last one matters more than it looks. Strata returns a typed code on failure, and the registry says for each one whether a retry is safe and whether the commit happened. An agent that reads it can tell a conflict it should resolve from a timeout it should retry.

Read these docs

Every reference page has a markdown twin at the same URL with .md appended, and the HTML advertises it with a link rel="alternate". Static hosting cannot negotiate on Accept, so the suffix is the mechanism.

For the whole corpus at once there is llms-full.txt, which is every published page concatenated, each carrying the URL it is served at. The index is llms.txt. Both are generated from the same data as the pages, so they cannot describe a site that is not there.

Version 1.2.1. If a page and the binary disagree, the binary is right: it was built with the engine, and this site is built from what that release published.