Introduction

What is Lightrail?

Lightrail is an open-source AI command bar & workflow platform that seeks to simplify software development. It is designed to be a general-purpose, extensible platform for integrating LLM-based tooling into engineering/development workflows. It does this by focusing on three components of working with LLMs: Providing sources of context, constructing effective prompts, and interfacing with external services.

Lightrail accomplishes these goals through an extension framework called Tracks. Tracks can provide Tokens, which are sources of dynamically generated context for a prompt, as well as Actions, which are functions that can modify a prompt, send it to an LLM, and use the LLM's response to execute functionality. All Lightrail functionality is delivered via the Tracks system, so a plain install of the Lightrail Core is essentially non-functional. Therefore, Lightrail's default installation includes a few commonly used tracks (Chat, VSCode, Chrome). More tracks are in development and will be installable through the Lightrail application.