mnemo

Claude Code forgets your corrections. mnemo doesn't.

Monday, in your app repo, you tell Claude: "never use npm in this repo, always yarn." You run mnemo learn — or you just end the session and let it happen. Thursday, a new session, you ask Claude to add a dependency: that rule is injected before Claude answers. One or two short lines, about 150 tokens, and only when it clearly applies.

What gets injected is a 300-character preview plus a pointer, under a reflex context: header: • [[use-yarn-not-npm]]: Use yarn, never npm …. mnemo also registers an MCP server so Claude can call read_mnemo_rule for the full text when the preview is not enough; the plugin sets it up, and /mnemo:doctor tells you if it is not connected.

A rule that recurs in two different repos is promoted to universal and follows you everywhere.

Measured on the maintainer's vault, 2026-09-02:

reflex: injected on 90 of 1041 prompts (8.7%)
recall: primacy@5 41.7% over 72 cases (mnemo recall, 2026-09-01)

reflex is the per-prompt recall; primacy@5 means the rule that session actually needed was in the top five. On topics with more than 20 rules, query-aware ranking lifted primacy@5 from 16% to 31% (530 evaluations). Your own numbers: mnemo status.

How it compares

CLAUDE.md — you write it and prune it by hand, and it is loaded whole, every session, whether or not any of it is relevant to what you're doing.

Claude Code auto memory — Claude writes it for you, but only the head of the index loads every session (200 lines as of 2026-09) and the rest is silently dropped. Nothing is ranked against the prompt in front of you.

mnemo — learns from your corrections and keeps a verifiable quote of what you actually said. Rules it can't verify stay staged for your review instead of entering the vault. Then it injects at most two rules per prompt — usually one — chosen by BM25F against the prompt text. No database, no daemon, no per-prompt LLM call.

Install

Inside Claude Code, type:

/plugin marketplace add xyrlan/mnemo
/plugin install mnemo@mnemo-marketplace

That's the whole thing. No terminal, no Python, no Node — mnemo ships as a self-contained binary that the plugin fetches for your platform on first use.

Restart Claude Code, and it's running.

npx @xyrlan/mnemo install              # prompts for global or project scope
npx @xyrlan/mnemo install --yes        # global, no prompts
npx @xyrlan/mnemo install --project --yes

pipx install mnemo-claude    # or: uv tool install mnemo-claude
mnemo init                   # global, or `mnemo init --project`

Check it worked

The five-minute loop is written out in docs/getting-started.md: correct Claude in your own words, run mnemo learn, read the output, type your next prompt on that subject.

Step 3 is the whole feature:

read: ~/.claude/projects/-Users-you-github-app/3f2a….jsonl
briefing: bots/app/briefings/sessions/3f2a….md (1 correction(s))
learned: use-yarn-not-npm — Use yarn, never npm (evidence: "never use npm in this repo, always yarn")
next prompt about this will surface it — check with `mnemo why`

The evidence: quote is your own sentence, carried back to you. A rule with a quote is a rule mnemo can prove you asked for.

Per-prompt recall (the reflex) is silent by design — it injects a rule only when one clearly beats the rest. To see the decisions themselves:

/mnemo:why

09:41:24  injected  mnemo-1.0-roadmap (6.84)
          ahead of  recall-degrades-with-topic-size (3.45)

09:30:07  silent    recall-degrades-with-topic-size led at 4.21 but needed 5.78
                    (1.50 x the runner-up's 3.85) to be clearly ahead
                    recall-degrades-with-topic-size  4.21
                    mnemo-1.0-roadmap                3.85

Silence with a reason is the difference between "my vault has nothing useful" and "my thresholds are a little too tight".

Day one

A fresh vault has nothing to inject, and mnemo does not go rummaging through your history uninvited. Claude Code keeps every past session on disk, so your first session in a repo with harvestable transcripts prints one line: how many sessions are there, and roughly what reading them would cost.

Nothing runs until you say so:

mnemo backfill --dry-run    # exactly what it would read, and what that costs
mnemo backfill              # this repo
mnemo backfill --all        # every project

Backfilled pages are reconstructed rather than observed, so every rule that comes out of them lands in shared/_inbox/ for you to read — backfilled material is never auto-promoted into shared/. /mnemo:doctor lists what's waiting. Details in docs/getting-started.md.

Commands

/mnemo:status   vault state + hook health
/mnemo:why      why per-prompt recall fired, or didn't, on your last prompts
/mnemo:doctor   full diagnostic with actionable fixes
/mnemo:learn    learn from this session now
/mnemo:help     list commands

Your rules are yours. mnemo export writes the ones for the repo you're in to .claude/rules/mnemo.md — a plain file Claude Code loads by itself, one lead sentence and your own quote per rule (--full for the whole bodies) — so a teammate without mnemo gets them too, and leaving mnemo costs you nothing. --host cursor and --host codex write the same rules where those tools look. Re-run after learning more; mnemo status says when the file is behind the vault.

Using Cursor or Codex as well? mnemo init --host cursor (or codex) registers mnemo's MCP server there and writes the rules file that tool reads (.cursor/rules/mnemo.mdc, AGENTS.md). Learning still happens in Claude Code; those tools get what it learned.

Everything else is a CLI subcommand (mnemo help --all): mnemo open, mnemo fix, mnemo statusline, mnemo backfill, mnemo reclassify, mnemo export, mnemo autopilot, mnemo disable-rule, and the rest.

Want the live heartbeat in your status line (mnemo · 9 topics · 7↓ today)? It's opt-in, because plugins can't set a status line:

mnemo statusline --install

Uninstall with /plugin uninstall mnemo. The vault is always preserved.

Autopilot

Between sessions, mnemo keeps its own brain in shape — rebuilding indices, sweeping dead rules, and calibrating how often rules get injected against your own hit/miss log. Nothing runs on the prompt path, and all of it is local.

It opens GitHub issues or pull requests only if you set autopilot.network.enabled to true.

Control it with mnemo autopilot {status,pause,off,on}.

Where things live

~/mnemo/                  your vault
├── HOME.md               dashboard at the top, your notes below
├── bots/<repo>/          per-project capture (logs, memory, briefings)
├── shared/               curated rules — the project brain
│   ├── feedback/         preferences and corrections
│   ├── user/             user-profile facts
│   ├── reference/        pointers to external systems
│   └── project/          per-repo project context
└── .mnemo/               internal state (indices, telemetry)

Edit HOME.md's notes section freely — mnemo only manages the dashboard block at the top.

Docs

• Getting started — the deeper tour: every install path, what gets written where, and how the loop works
• Configuration — every knob in mnemo.config.json
• Troubleshooting — when something looks wrong
• Obsidian — optional: browse the vault as a graph

Privacy

100% local. No network calls unless you turn autopilot.network.enabled on. No third-party Python dependencies. Every piece of telemetry (.mnemo/*.jsonl) stays on disk.

LLM calls go through the claude CLI you already have — one per session for the briefing, and one per ten new files at extraction time — never on the prompt path. Logs are capped at 1 MB; briefings accumulate, one file per session. The one other outbound call is the plugin downloading its binary from GitHub Releases on first use (checksum-verified). Read the source.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.