Stop Losing the "Why"
Behind Your Code

Capture technical decisions in your PRs. Find them instantly in your IDE. Never let institutional knowledge walk out the door again.

The Problem: Knowledge Rot

💀 Institutional Memory Loss

When a senior developer leaves, their reasoning leaves with them. You're left staring at "weird" code with no explanation.

🔍 Context Fragmentation

Decision logic is scattered across Slack, Jira, and old PR comments. Finding the "why" takes hours of archaeology.

😰 Fear of Change

Developers avoid refactoring critical code because they don't understand the hidden assumptions. Technical debt piles up.

The Solution: Capture Context Where It Happens

ContextLock integrates into your GitHub workflow to capture the "why" at the moment of change—and surfaces it exactly when you need it.

🚨 Automatic Risk Detection

Configure rules in .contextlock.yaml to identify risky changes.

Database migrations? Security updates? Core config changes? ContextLock blocks the PR until a human explanation is provided.

No busywork. Only asks when it matters.

version: 1 rules: - name: "Database Schema" paths: ["db/migrations/**"] required: true message: "Explain migration strategy"

💬 Frictionless Capture

When a PR is flagged, developers explain their decision in seconds:

• Comment /why Increased timeout to handle slow EU payment APIs

• Or use the simple web form

Context is automatically linked to the commit SHA and file paths.

⚠️ ContextLock Check Failed
This PR modifies risky paths. Please provide context.
developer123 commented:
/why Increased timeout from 5s to 15s because EU payment gateways have higher latency during peak hours. See incident #4521.

💡 IDE Integration

Hover over any line in VS Code to see the "why" behind recent changes.

No more browser tab switching. No more digging through Git history.

Context exactly when you need it.

const timeout = 15000; // ms
📝 Context from PR #342
Increased from 5s to 15s for EU payment gateways (higher latency during peak).
@sarah_dev • 6 days ago • View PR

How It Works

1

Install GitHub App

One-click installation. No code changes required.

2

Configure Rules

Add .contextlock.yaml to define what changes need context.

3

Develop Normally

ContextLock automatically monitors PRs and asks for context when needed.

4

Find Answers Fast

Hover in your IDE or search by intent to retrieve context instantly.

Don't Let Knowledge Walk Out the Door

Join engineering teams who are building codebases that remember why.