Xirp is an advanced agentic development environment designed to provide engineering teams with institutional memory. Created by Spotify and powered by Spotify Portal, the tool solves the common problem of AI agents operating in isolation by providing them with crucial project and architectural context. Instead of relying on guesswork, Xirp connects directly to your services, ownership metadata, documentation, and historical architectural decisions, ensuring that every AI coding session is fully grounded in your organization’s specific reality. By bridging the gap between disconnected information—such as buried Slack threads and legacy tribal knowledge—and the development workflow, Xirp allows engineering teams to ship code faster and with significantly higher confidence.

Functionally, Xirp acts as a centralized command surface for AI-driven development. It manages terminal sessions, Git worktrees, and file layouts, allowing developers to switch seamlessly between different projects, agents, and sessions without losing their progress. By integrating with Spotify Portal, it transforms standard coding interactions into a shared knowledge base, ensuring that context persists across the entire team and between successive sessions, effectively automating the capture of living documentation without requiring manual effort from engineers.

Some of the key features are:

• Agentic Grounding: Connects coding agents to live system data, ownership, and architecture to ensure all outputs are operationally accurate.
• Persistent Context: Uses the Workspace plugin within Spotify Portal to store work items and session context, making it available for future engineers or agents.
• Living Documentation: Automatically generates and updates documentation based on actual coding work and session outcomes.
• Model Flexibility: Enables developers to choose and switch between different AI models, including Claude, Gemini, and Codex, while maintaining a unified organizational context layer.
• Git Worktree Management: Isolates tasks into separate Git worktrees, allowing agents to work on multiple tasks in parallel without interfering with existing checkouts.
• Unified Control Surface: Provides a single interface to manage terminals, files, agent skills, and session layouts.

Operating Xirp involves installing the macOS desktop application and authenticating with your chosen coding agents through their native CLIs. For teams utilizing the Portal integration, the setup involves linking Xirp to a Portal instance to unlock catalog-based workflows and shared team workspaces. Once connected, sessions can be launched directly from catalog entities, allowing the environment to automatically ingest relevant context via MCP. When a session is complete, the resulting work and knowledge can be uploaded to the Workspace to inform future tasks.

Some common use cases include:

• Onboarding New Engineers: Providing new team members with immediate, grounded context about a service’s ownership, dependencies, and architectural history.
• Automated Documentation Updates: Maintaining current technical documentation without requiring manual input during active development sprints.
• Cross-Service Impact Analysis: Using agentic insight into system dependencies to safely refactor code across multiple related services.
• Shared Agentic Sessions: Allowing different engineers or automated agents to resume complex development tasks precisely where a previous session left off, with full access to previous decisions and reasoning.