hindsight-cline

Persistent long-term memory for Cline via Hindsight — no MCP required.

Cline's lifecycle hooks run small scripts at key moments. This integration installs hooks that automatically recall relevant memories before Cline works and retain what happened when a task ends. Memory persists across sessions, so Cline builds on past context instead of starting cold.

What It Does

• Before a task / each message — the TaskStart and UserPromptSubmit hooks recall relevant memories from Hindsight and inject them as context.
• When a task ends — the TaskComplete (and TaskCancel) hook retains the task's prompts and summary for future sessions.
• Deterministic — because it runs on hooks, memory happens automatically; it doesn't depend on the model deciding to call a tool (no MCP).

Prerequisites

✨ Recommended: Hindsight Cloud — sign up free, get an API key, and skip self-hosting.

Self-hosting alternative:

pip install hindsight-all
export HINDSIGHT_API_LLM_API_KEY=your-openai-key
hindsight-api  # starts on http://localhost:8888

Platform: Cline hooks run on macOS and Linux only (no Windows). Hooks need Python 3.

Installation

pip install hindsight-cline

Then, from your project directory:

hindsight-cline install --api-url https://api.hindsight.vectorize.io --api-token YOUR_KEY

Install globally (applies to all projects):

hindsight-cline install --global --api-url https://api.hindsight.vectorize.io --api-token YOUR_KEY

To remove it later: hindsight-cline uninstall (add --global if you installed globally).

This copies four hook scripts (TaskStart, UserPromptSubmit, TaskComplete, TaskCancel) plus their lib/ and settings.json into:

• .clinerules/hooks/ (project install — commit it to share with your team), or
• ~/Documents/Cline/Rules/Hooks/ (global install).

Final step — enable hooks in Cline: Settings → Features → Hooks.

How It Works

Task starts ─ TaskStart ─────────► recall(task description) → inject memories
You send a message ─ UserPromptSubmit ─► recall(prompt) → inject memories
                                          (and append the prompt to the task transcript)
Task completes ─ TaskComplete ──► retain(accumulated transcript + summary)
Task cancelled ─ TaskCancel ────► retain(partial transcript)

Cline doesn't hand hooks a conversation transcript, so the integration accumulates each task's prompts in ~/.hindsight/cline/state/ and retains them at task end. Memories land in a single bank (cline by default).

Configuration

Defaults live in the installed settings.json; put personal overrides in ~/.hindsight/cline.json (stable across reinstalls). Common keys:

Every key can also be set via HINDSIGHT_* environment variables (e.g. HINDSIGHT_BANK_ID, HINDSIGHT_AUTO_RECALL=false).

Verifying Setup

1. Start Hindsight (hindsight-api or Hindsight Cloud) and run hindsight-cline install with your URL/key.
2. Enable hooks in Cline (Settings → Features → Hooks).
3. Start a task — recalled memories appear in context as a <hindsight_memories> block.
4. Complete a task, then check the cline bank (via the API or dashboard) — a memory should appear.

You can smoke-test a hook without Cline:

echo '{"hookName":"UserPromptSubmit","prompt":"how do we authenticate?","taskId":"t1","workspaceRoots":["/tmp/x"]}' \
  | .clinerules/hooks/UserPromptSubmit
# → {"cancel": false, "contextModification": "<hindsight_memories>…", "errorMessage": ""}

Development

uv sync
uv run pytest tests/ -v