Should I keep my AI memory in GitHub?
For code conventions, yes. A repo of Markdown and an AGENTS.md file is a good, portable, reviewable home for anything an engineer maintains next to the code, and most coding agents already read it. Business context is a different job. The people who own it do not open pull requests, and the merge that matters is between meanings, not lines.
Git solves several hard problems already
A repository gives you history, diffs, blame, review, ownership, and portability without building any of it. You can see what a rule said last quarter, who changed it, what the pull request argued, and who approved the change. That is more provenance than most knowledge bases will ever have.
The conventions are real too. AGENTS.md is described by its maintainers as a README for agents: a predictable place to put build steps, test commands, and project context. Tens of thousands of open source projects use it, and it is read by a long list of coding tools including Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Zed, Aider, Jules, and Gemini CLI. If your question is where to put instructions for an agent working in your codebase, the answer is the codebase.
HexaHQ does not want that job. Keep your engineering context in the repo where it belongs. This page is about what happens when people try to put the rest of the company in there too.
Source: AGENTS.md, checked 28 August 2026.
Merging concepts is not merging lines
This is the failure that people underestimate, so it is worth being exact about it. Two pull requests land
in the same week. One adds a line to policies/refunds.md: "Refunds over $500 need Finance
approval." The other adds a line to support/handbook.md: "Anything above half a thousand
dollars goes to the deal desk."
Git reports no conflict, because there is none. Different files, different lines, both merge clean, both reviewers approved a change that looked reasonable on its own. The repository now contains two rules that cannot both be followed, with no marker anywhere saying so, and an agent searching for the refund rule finds both and picks one.
The question a company actually needs answered is not "did these lines collide." It is: do these two statements describe the same concept, which meaning is current, who had the authority to decide, and where does each version apply. No text merge answers any of those.
The people who own the rules do not open pull requests
Your best operating knowledge is held by the person who has run renewals for four years, the analyst who knows which of your revenue numbers is the one you quote, the support lead who knows which escalations are worth waking someone for. Asking them to branch, commit, and wait for review means the knowledge stays in their heads. Anything that holds business context has to be writable during ordinary work, by people who will never see a terminal.
Repository access is a blunt audience control
Read access to a repo is read access to every file in it. Separating audiences means splitting into more repositories, and anything two groups both need gets copied into both, which is where the drift starts again. Access also answers a different question from the one that matters: whether someone may read a file is not the same as whether that rule governs their work.
Directory scope is a good proxy for code and a poor one for policy
AGENTS.md is scoped by where it sits in the tree, and for code that is close to perfect, because the folder genuinely is the subject. Company rules are not organized by folder. "Applies to enterprise renewals in EMEA, above $50,000, since the March pricing change" is not a path.
Reading the repo is the easy part
Plenty of AI clients can read a repository without an engineer, through a GitHub connector or GitHub's own MCP server. Nobody has to clone anything. The harder part is the other direction: the finance analyst who knows the rule cannot maintain it there. So the context that is easiest to version is exactly the context the fewest people can write, and the teams generating the most operating knowledge contribute least.
A repository cannot do the work
The rule is the input. The task is updating the CRM, issuing the credit, sending the renewal notice. A repo has no way to run that through the right person's account, pause when the action is consequential, and record what happened.
Version the meaning, and reconcile it out loud
Git is excellent at versioning text and code. Organizational rules are harder because two statements can use different words, apply to different groups, or both remain valid under different conditions. HexaHQ treats that as a context problem, not only a file merge.
HexaHQ keeps versions, like Git does. What it adds is what happens when two versions disagree. Everyone can hold their own edits of a shared document. When the company's version moves ahead, the parts that do not collide are merged into your copy automatically. When both sides changed the same thing, HexaHQ refuses to pick, and hands the conflict to your AI to talk through with you in plain language: here is what you changed, here is what the company changed, how do you want it settled. What the merge decided is recorded with the document, so the reasoning outlives the conversation.
That is the piece a line merge structurally cannot provide. HexaHQ never guesses which meaning wins, and it never quietly overwrites a person's version of a rule they may know more about than the company does.
Audience is a property of the knowledge, not of the repo
Repository access tells you who can reach the files. It does not by itself decide which business rule should guide a particular person, role, or task. HexaHQ keeps that applicability with the context itself, so each document carries its own audience: personal, a named team or project group, the whole organization, or a specific outside collaborator such as a client, contractor, or advisor.
A person's AI inherits that boundary. It can use what its person is meant to have, plus that person's own working context, and it does not pick up the rest. That is what makes it safe to keep one canonical version of a rule instead of forking it into three repos and hoping they stay in step.
The clean merge that broke the policy
A platform team sets up a knowledge repo. It works well for six months. Engineering conventions live in AGENTS.md, the on-call runbook is in Markdown, and the coding agents behave better than they used to.
Then Support asks to put the refund rule in there too. A pull request adds "Refunds over $500 need Finance approval." Two weeks later a different pull request, from a different team, adds the deal-desk wording to a different file. Both merge clean. Nobody is wrong. In March, Finance raises the threshold and updates one of the two files, because they only knew about one.
In HexaHQ, the refund rule is one document with one current version, shared with Support and Finance. When Finance raises the threshold, that is a new version of the same document, and anyone whose personal copy had unrelated edits gets those merged in without being asked. The one person who had edited the same sentence gets a short conversation with their AI about which wording to keep, and the resolution is recorded. The support rep's AI then issues the credit through the billing system on the rep's own account, within the policy that governs that capability.
Git, repos, and AI memory, answered
Should I keep my AI memory in GitHub?
For code conventions, build steps, and anything an engineer maintains next to the code, yes. It is portable, reviewable, and already read by most coding agents. It is a poor fit for business context, because the people who own that context do not open pull requests and because merging two statements of the same rule is not a line merge.
Can I use Git as a knowledge base for AI agents?
You can, and people do. Git gives you history, diffs, blame, review, and ownership for free. The limits show up around meaning rather than storage: two files can state the same rule in different words and Git will report no conflict, so the repository ends up holding both and an agent finds both.
What is AGENTS.md?
A plain Markdown file at the root of a repository that gives AI coding agents build steps, test commands, and code conventions. Its maintainers describe it as a README for agents. It is used by tens of thousands of open source projects and read by many coding tools. It is a good standard for code, and it was not designed to carry a company's operating rules.
Why is merging organizational knowledge harder than merging code?
Git compares lines. Two people can write the same rule in different words, in different files, and nothing collides. Or they can write rules that conflict only for one audience, or that are both correct under different conditions. Deciding whether two statements describe the same concept, which meaning is canonical, who had the authority, and where each applies is a judgment.
Will non-engineers maintain AI memory in a repository?
Usually not. The people holding the most valuable operating knowledge are often in sales, finance, support, and legal. Asking them to branch, commit, and wait for review means the knowledge stays in their heads.
Isn't repository access enough to control who sees what?
Repository access is coarse. Read access to a repo is read access to every file in it, so separating audiences means splitting into more repositories, which duplicates anything two groups both need. It also says nothing about which rules apply to a given person's work, which is a different question from whether they may read the file.
Can I keep using a repo alongside HexaHQ?
Yes, and most teams should. Keep engineering context in the repo. Put the rules other departments need to follow, and the reusable ways of working built on top of them, where the people who own them can write and correct them during normal work. HexaHQ also connects to GitHub as a system your AI can act in.
Related comparisons
Keep the repo. Give the rest of the company somewhere to write.
Versioned, reconciled, and shared with the people who should have it. Free to start.