What is Precursor?

Opinionated approach to work follow-up, built as an AI assistant.

Precursor is an AI assistant that keeps each thread of work in its own topic, where topic may map to a GitHub issue. It's a small, opinionated tool for tracking work-in-progress conversations alongside the issues they belong to.

Every chat is scoped to a topic that can be linked to (or create) a GitHub issue. The assistant uses that issue's body, comments, and labels as live context — rebuilt on every turn, so newer updates outweigh older ones.

Under the hood Precursor is deliberately compact: normal runtime is a single uvicorn worker that serves a JSON API and the pre-built React SPA from the same process.

Why it exists

Most AI chat tools are a flat list of disconnected conversations. Work isn't flat — it's organized around issues, meetings, and tasks that unfold over days or weeks. Precursor keeps each thread of work in its own topic, hydrated from the GitHub issue it belongs to, so the assistant always has the current state of that work at hand.

Around that core it layers the other things a follow-up assistant needs: a place for throwaway chats, a live meeting recorder, autonomous agents for long-running tasks, a scheduler for recurring nudges, and MCP tools in both directions.

Highlights

• Topic-scoped, tree-organized conversations, each optionally linked to a GitHub issue whose labels tag the chat.
• Streaming chat over Server-Sent Events (sse) with markdown, mermaid, and code highlighting.
• Bring your own model — GitHub Copilot (default), GitHub Models, Azure AI Foundry, or any OpenAI-compatible gateway.
• MCP both ways — Precursor exposes its conversations and features as an MCP server and attaches external MCP tool servers to extend its capabilities.
• Live meeting assistant — Meeting transcription via Azure Speech, live insights, Q&A, and an editable summary.
• Agents mode (opt-in) — hand a complex task to an autonomous Copilot SDK agent and follow it in a workflow-style timeline.
• Skills & memory, a scheduler with recurrence and guards, reminders, workspaces the assistant can edit, and a Kanban board over your issues.
• Plugin-ready — backend entry points plus a frontend extension registry.

The stack in one line

Python 3.12+ · FastAPI · SQLAlchemy 2 (async) · Alembic · Vite + React 19 + TypeScript · Tailwind CSS · the mcp and openai SDKs — with uv as the one toolchain for env, run, build, and release. See the technical stack for the full breakdown.

Where to next

• Installation — get the app running locally.
• Quick start — your first topic in a couple of minutes.
• Configuration — GitHub token, model providers, and settings.
• Feature guides — a tour of everything Precursor can do.

Single-user by design

Precursor ships with no authentication and is meant to run bound to 127.0.0.1. Don't expose it to a network without your own authenticating reverse proxy in front of it. See the security model.