Agentic Task System (ats) MCP Server

Agentic Task System

Your task manager is the best agent memory you're not using.

ats is an MCP server and CLI that gives your AI agent memory from the task manager you already use — TickTick or an Obsidian vault — with hybrid (dense + sparse + keyword, RRF) retrieval and no vector database to build or maintain.

Most "agent memory" projects build a new store — a vector DB, a bespoke framework — that drifts from reality the moment you stop feeding it. But you already maintain a knowledge base by hand, every day: your task app. Years of curated, prioritized, deduplicated context, pre-filtered by the most reliable ranker there is — you.

ATS makes that context agent-native. Adapter, not migration: keep the app you already live in (TickTick or an Obsidian vault today; Notion next) and give your agent a fast, structured, two-way channel into it.

npm install -g @reneza/ats-cli @reneza/ats-adapter-ticktick
ats config use ticktick
ats auth login
ats find "deployment runbook"

Why this exists

Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea — keep notes as plain markdown an LLM can reason over — is right about the destination and wrong about the starting line. Almost nobody's knowledge lives in clean markdown; it lives in the task app they've used for years. ATS closes that gap with pluggable storage adapters, so you get an agent-queryable knowledge layer without re-homing a single note.

What changes when you wire it up

Three shifts, in the order they surprised me in real use:

1. The task app becomes a two-way bus between you and your agent. It's not just somewhere the agent reads — it's where you and the agent hand work back and forth. Drop a task with a file attached and the agent picks it up with full context; the agent writes results back where you'll actually see them. Your existing capture habit becomes the I/O channel — attachments and all.

2. Semantic retrieval makes the first fetch the right one. Parallel hybrid retrieval (dense + sparse + keyword, fused with RRF, with provenance) instead of keyword grep. In practice this collapsed the usual "search → refine → search again" loop into a single fetch that comes back both faster and richer. Better context on turn one means better answers on turn one.

3. Context gets curated at write time, not just read time. The half everyone skips. Every item is hung on a "trunk" — a theme you already care about (writing, client-work, side-project) — the moment it's captured, so retrieval has structure to grab instead of a flat pile.

Plus the plumbing that makes it usable every turn: a disk-backed corpus cache with sub-100ms warm latency, and a benchmark harness so retrieval quality is measured, not asserted.

Architecture

agentic-task-system/
├── packages/
│   ├── core/                       # adapter-agnostic
│   │   ├── retrieval.js            # find, hybrid, RRF
│   │   ├── corpus-cache.js
│   │   ├── usage-log.js
│   │   ├── bench/                  # harness
│   │   └── adapter-interface.md
│   ├── adapter-ticktick/           # reference adapter (today)
│   ├── adapter-obsidian/           # local markdown vault (shipped v0.4)
│   ├── adapter-notion/             # planned
│   ├── cli/                        # `ats` command
│   └── mcp/                        # `@reneza/ats-mcp` — MCP server
├── docs/
│   ├── adapter-interface.md
│   ├── wiki-conventions.md
│   └── retrieval.md
└── examples/
    └── ticktick/                   # sanitized cron examples

Adapter interface (the contract)

Six methods. Implement them, you have an adapter:

interface KnowledgeAdapter {
  listProjects(): Promise<Project[]>
  listTasksInProject(projectId: string): Promise<Task[]>
  getTask(projectId: string, taskId: string): Promise<Task>
  createTask(input: TaskInput): Promise<Task>
  updateTask(projectId: string, taskId: string, patch: TaskPatch): Promise<Task>
  urlFor(ref: { projectId: string, taskId: string }): string
}

Optional methods (Core uses if present, falls back to its own logic if not):

interface KnowledgeAdapter {
  searchByQuery?(query: string): Promise<Task[]>     // adapter's native search
  bulkFetch?(): Promise<Task[]>                       // single-call corpus refresh
  embeddings?(texts: string[]): Promise<number[][]>  // adapter-supplied embeddings
}

Full spec: docs/adapter-interface.md.

Available adapters

Adapter	Status	Storage
ticktick	reference	TickTick OpenAPI v1 + qdrant + ollama (nomic-embed)
obsidian	shipped v0.4	local markdown vault (files on disk)
notion	planned	Notion API
things	wishlist	Things URL scheme + AppleScript
apple-notes	wishlist	AppleScript
google-tasks	wishlist	Google Tasks API

PRs welcome. Scaffold one in seconds and verify it against the contract:

ats adapter new notion              # writes ats-adapter-notion/ (six stubs + package.json)
# …implement the six methods…
ats adapter test ./ats-adapter-notion   # pass/fail/skip per contract check

Already shipped: the Obsidian adapter is a worked example of the contract over plain markdown — point ATS at a vault with ATS_OBSIDIAN_VAULT and ats find / ats open / ats links just work.

The scaffold + conformance kit + interface doc make it a couple-hundred-line job for most well-behaved APIs.

CLI surface (adapter-agnostic)

# Lifecycle
ats init <adapter>                 # select adapter + run a health check
ats config use <adapter>           # switch active adapter
ats auth login                     # delegates to adapter
ats doctor                         # adapter, auth, capabilities, cache, retrieval

# Adapters
ats adapter new <name>             # scaffold a starter adapter package
ats adapter test [target]          # run the conformance kit (pass/fail/skip)

# Retrieval
ats find <query>                   # parallel + RRF + provenance — DEFAULT
ats find <query> --explain         # ...and show each result's per-branch rank + RRF math
ats open <id-or-title>             # jump straight to it in your task app (deep link)
ats get <id-or-title> [--extract raw|json|yaml]
ats url <id-or-title>              # paste-ready cross-reference link
ats links <project> <task>         # resolve all deep-links inside a task body
ats hybrid <query>                 # RRF of dense + sparse only
ats similar <id>                   # find docs semantically like this one

# Any read command takes --json (alias for --format json) for piping to jq / agents:
ats find "deploy" --json | jq '.tasks[].title'

# Authoring
ats create "<title>" [--content "..."] [--project <id>] [--relevance]
ats update <project> <task> [--content "..."] [--title "..."]

# Ops
ats bench run                      # run all retrievers against bench/data/questions.jsonl
ats bench score                    # markdown report of hit@1 / recall@5 / MRR
ats bench analyze-usage            # per-tool stats from ~/.config/ats/search-log.jsonl

Use it from an agent (MCP)

@reneza/ats-mcp exposes the active adapter to any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, …) as a small tool set — find, get_task, list_projects, create_task, update_task, similar, url_for — all backed by the same hybrid + RRF retrieval. Storage-agnostic over the adapter contract.

// Claude Desktop config
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ats": { "command": "ats-mcp", "env": { "ATS_ADAPTER": "@reneza/ats-adapter-ticktick" } }
  }
}

Quickstart with the TickTick adapter

Already installed from the snippet at the top? Pick up at the OAuth step:

# Interactive — sets up TickTick OAuth + creates ~/.config/ats/config.json
ats config use ticktick
ats auth login

# (optional) For semantic / hybrid retrieval, run a local qdrant + ollama:
docker run -d --name qdrant -p 6333:6333 qdrant/qdrant
docker run -d --name ollama -p 11434:11434 ollama/ollama
docker exec ollama ollama pull nomic-embed-text
ats sync vector

# Try it
ats find "ffmpeg commands"

Conventions

• Pick a wiki project. A designated project (default: Permanent Notes) holds your durable knowledge. Other projects hold ephemeral tasks.
• Agent-data notes = a regular note whose body has a fenced json or yaml block. Cron scripts and agents extract it via ats get <title> --extract json.
• Cross-references = adapter-native deep-link markdown form. Generate with ats url <title> (don't hand-write).
• See docs/wiki-conventions.md for the full pattern.

State integrity (the design rule)

Agent systems fail when the harness silently re-renders state between turns. ATS is a memory layer, so it holds the line: writes round-trip without lossy re-encoding, the store → Task mapping is contract-tested (not a black box), and every retrieval result carries its provenance (sources, find --explain). The same rule guards the outbound boundary — a publish-safety gate (scripts/check-no-pii.mjs) fails the build if personal data could leak into a package. Full note: docs/state-integrity.md.

Versioning

This is v0.4 — the Obsidian adapter (the contract over plain markdown), a storage-agnostic CLI, and a publish-safety gate, on top of v0.3's storage-agnostic core retrieval + MCP server + adapter toolkit (conformance kit + scaffold + doctor). See CHANGELOG.md.

License

MIT