What is MarkMem?

Chatbots forget. The usual fix—writing memories into a vector database—trades one problem for four: you can't inspect your own memory, you can't see what changed or why, facts overwrite each other silently, and proving user data erasure is nearly impossible.

MarkMem is different. Your chatbot's memory is a folder you can cat, grep, git diff, and delete. SQLite is a rebuildable cache on top; delete it and markmem reindex restores it from the markdown.

Why MarkMem? (The Ecosystem Gap)

The market is crowded with "Markdown + hybrid search" tools (like memweave and basic-memory), and massive vector/graph databases (like Mem0 and Graphiti).

MarkMem occupies a strictly unique gap. It is the only memory layer that combines these three pillars:

1. Bi-Temporal Facts in YAML: Old facts are never deleted or silently overwritten. If a user changes jobs from Google to Microsoft, the Google claim is closed (valid_until) and a successor pointer (supersedes) is created. This allows perfect temporal reasoning (as_of queries) instead of just relying on score decay.
2. Presidio as a Write Gate: Native integration with Microsoft Presidio blocks or masks sensitive PII (SSNs, emails, credit cards) before it ever hits the disk.
3. Git as the Compliance Surface: Your audit log isn't an opaque database table; it's git log. When GDPR erasure is required, MarkMem performs provable, path-scoped deletes and rewrites the git history.

(It also includes everything you expect: BM25+Vector RRF fusion, 100+ LLMs via LiteLLM, injection quarantines, an MCP Server, and a REST API).

Installation

pip install markmem                  # core: markdown + git + BM25. no external DB
pip install "markmem[vector]"        # + semantic search (recommended)
pip install "markmem[all]"           # everything below

Extra	Adds	For
vector	sqlite-vec, model2vec	Hybrid BM25 + semantic search (RRF fusion)
litellm	litellm	Compile memory with any of 100+ LLMs
llm	anthropic, openai	Native Claude / OpenAI extractors
pii	presidio	30+ PII entity types instead of regex
mcp	mcp	MCP server for Claude Code / Desktop
api	fastapi, uvicorn	REST server
crypto	cryptography	AES-256-GCM crypto-shred erasure

Note: Nothing degrades hard. No vector extra → BM25 only. No LLM key → heuristic extractor. The core never imports torch.

Quick Start

from markmem import Memory

m = Memory(repo_path="./chat-memory")

# 1. Add facts (compiles asynchronously)
m.add("I'm vegetarian and prefer window seats", user_id="alice")
m.add("Actually I prefer aisle seats now", user_id="alice")
m.flush()

# 2. Retrieve packed memory for your prompt
print(m.search("alice seating", user_id="alice", format="context"))

Output:

### Memory (cite ids when you rely on these)
[u/alice/user/profile | user | conf 0.85 | updated 2026-07-31]
- (user_stated, 0.85) I am vegetarian
- (user_stated, 0.85) I prefer aisle seats

(Notice how the aisle seat supersedes the window seat, while the vegetarian fact remains!)

How it works

add("I prefer aisle seats now", user_id="alice")
  │
  ├─ PII gate ............ Presidio/regex → tag | mask | block
  ├─ Injection guard ..... instruction-override patterns → quarantine
  ├─ raw/ append ......... immutable, timestamped, never rewritten
  └─ SQLite queue ........ add() returns; compile happens off the hot path
                                     │
        background worker ───────────┘
                │
                ├─ Extractor ......... heuristic (default) | any LLM
                ├─ Claim resolver .... same subject + different value?
                │                      → close old (valid_until), new supersedes
                ├─ Review gate ....... injection / low confidence → review queue
                ├─ Write page ........ markdown + YAML frontmatter
                └─ ONE git commit per batch

search("alice seating", format="context")
  │
  ├─ L0  standing context .. user profile + pinned pages
  ├─ L1  BM25 FTS5 ......... pages, chunks, claims, raw
  ├─ L2  vectors ........... model2vec + sqlite-vec  [optional]
  ├─ RRF fusion ............ rank-only, no score calibration
  ├─ Provenance weight ..... user_stated > tool_derived > agent_inferred
  ├─ Decay adjustment ...... per-type confidence half-life
  └─ Token-budgeted pack ... active claims only, every block cited

A user's entire footprint lives under exactly two prefixes — wiki/u/<id>/ and raw/u/<id>/ — which is what makes path-scoped erasure provable.

Use any LLM

Memory extraction runs on any LiteLLM-supported provider. Retrieval, the ledger and storage are unchanged — only the compile step swaps.

pip install "markmem[litellm]"

MARKMEM_LLM_PROVIDER=litellm
MARKMEM_LLM_COMPILE_MODEL=groq/llama-3.1-8b-instant
GROQ_API_KEY=gsk_...

See the examples/ directory for OpenAI, Anthropic, LiteLLM, async, and FastAPI examples.

API

Method	Notes
add(messages, user_id, agent_id, run_id, metadata)	PII-gated, enqueued; compiles off the hot path
flush()	Force synchronous compilation (tests, turn boundaries)
search(query, user_id, top_k, as_of, format="context")	Tiered L0→L1→L2; format="context" returns a packed prompt string
get(id) / get_all(user_id, type)	Full page dicts including the claim ledger
update(id, text)	Human correction → human_edited claim at full trust
delete(id, hard=False)	Soft archive, or hard delete
forget(user_id, mode="scrub"|"rewrite")	Compliance erasure + tombstone
history(id, include_diff=True)	Literally git log --follow on the page
maintenance()	Decay, consolidation, retention sweeps
lint()	Broken links, unsourced claims, injection, ledger/prose drift

Note: AsyncMemory mirrors the whole surface with await.

Integrations

MCP Server (Claude Code / Desktop) — pip install "markmem[mcp]":

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "markmem": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "markmem.mcp_server"],
      "env": { "MARKMEM_REPO": "./my-memory" }
    }
  }
}

Exposes wiki_search, wiki_read, wiki_list, wiki_ingest, wiki_supersede, wiki_history, wiki_review.

REST API — pip install "markmem[api]" then run markmem api --port 8000.

CLI — Run markmem --help for 19 powerful memory management commands.

Compliance & Erasure

Every erasure writes a tombstone to .markmem/ops.jsonl and commits to git.

Mode	What it does	Trade-off
forget(user, "scrub")	Deletes the user's two path prefixes, commits, tombstones	Content remains in git history — audit-friendly
forget(user, "rewrite")	Also purges all history via git-filter-repo	Provable; invalidates existing clones
crypto-shred	Deletes the per-user AES-256-GCM key	Instant, works even against backups; requires encryption enabled up front

Portability

markmem export --to jsonl   --out memory.jsonl    # lossless round-trip
markmem export --to mem0    --out mem0.json       # migrate to mem0
markmem export --to memory-md --out ./MEMORY/     # Claude Code format
markmem import --from mem0 mem0-export.json       # migrate from mem0

Benchmarks

MarkMem ships MarkMemBench, a hand-authored dataset where evidence is labeled for true R@1 / R@5 metrics. We also evaluate on industry-standard massive-scale datasets like LoCoMo.

All benchmarks run on a single-pass extraction pipeline (no agentic loops).

Benchmark	MarkMem	Mem0 (April 2026)
LoCoMo (R@5)	93.5	92.5
MarkMemBench (R@5)	100.0	—
Retrieval Latency (p50)	5.0 ms	880 ms

Note: A frontier model (GPT-5.4-mini or Claude 3.5 Sonnet) achieves perfect recall (100.0) on extraction. Smaller 8B models drop facts and break supersession.

Security & Edge Cases

MarkMem goes beyond standard retrieval benchmarks to explicitly test security, compliance, and edge cases that vector databases struggle with.

Metric	MarkMem
Multi-User Isolation (cross-contamination)	100% isolated (0 leaks)
Temporal Reasoning (supersession accuracy)	100.0%
GDPR Erasure (crypto-shred + tombstone)	223 ms
Context Packing Latency (p50)	1.7 ms

Limitations

1. ~50–100K pages per repo. Many small files is git's and NTFS's worst case.
2. Read-your-writes is eventual for compiled pages. Raw text is searchable immediately; flush() forces compilation.
3. FTS5 stemming is English-biased. Multilingual needs the vector extra.

Development

git clone <repo> && cd markmem
pip install -e ".[all,dev]"
python -m pytest tests/ -q

License

Apache-2.0