Pituitary FAQs

Question 1

What is Pituitary and what problem does it solve?

Accepted Answer

Pituitary is a developer tool designed to automatically index specifications, documentation, and decision records across your projects. It detects critical inconsistencies like overlapping content, contradictions, stale documentation, terminology drift, and code that doesn't comply with approved specs, ensuring your project's intent remains consistent.

Question 2

What kind of drift can Pituitary detect?

Accepted Answer

Pituitary detects several forms of drift, including overlapping specifications, stale documentation, code that contradicts specifications, and terminology drift where new language is adopted but old terms persist in project artifacts. It aims to catch 'intent drift' before it impacts your project.

Question 3

Can Pituitary integrate into existing development workflows?

Accepted Answer

Absolutely. Pituitary offers a single binary CLI for easy local use and command-line automation. It also provides an optional MCP server for seamless integration with modern editors like Claude Code or Cursor, and dedicated CI/CD recipes to embed spec hygiene checks directly into your build pipelines.

Question 4

How does Pituitary help maintain code compliance and documentation accuracy?

Accepted Answer

It checks pull request diffs against existing specifications to prevent non-compliant merges. Pituitary also identifies stale documentation when a linked specification changes, ensuring all related project artifacts are up-to-date and consistent with the latest decisions.

Question 5

Does Pituitary require external services or API keys?

Accepted Answer

No, Pituitary operates as a self-contained single binary with no external dependencies or API keys needed out-of-the-box, storing all data in a single SQLite file. For enhanced semantic capabilities, it offers optional integration with OpenAI-compatible embedding APIs (cloud or local LLMs like Ollama).

Pituitary

Pituitary

Key Features

Use Cases

Key Features

Use Cases