tessera-context 0.1.0rc1

Portable context layer for T-shaped AI-native users. Single-file encrypted SQLite vault served over MCP.

Tessera — Portable context for AI tools

A local-first context layer for agents and AI tools. Tessera stores durable user and project context in an encrypted SQLite vault, exposes it through a scoped MCP surface, and retrieves cross-facet bundles with hybrid search, rerank, SWCR, and token budgeting.

Open source. Local-first. Apache 2.0.

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Status

Tessera is a developer preview, not a general release. The repo contains the packaged Python CLI, encrypted vault, daemon, HTTP MCP endpoint, stdio bridge, connector writers, retrieval pipeline, and test suite. v0.1 remains gated on clean-VM install and an external-user demo. See docs/release-spec.md for the release bar.

Install from source during the preview:

uv sync --dev
uv run tessera --help

Core local flow:

uv run tessera init --vault ~/.tessera/vault.db
uv run tessera daemon start --vault ~/.tessera/vault.db
uv run tessera connect claude-code --vault ~/.tessera/vault.db

ChatGPT Developer Mode is deferred to v0.1.x because the current ChatGPT flow requires HTTPS/OAuth/canonical HTTP MCP compatibility that Tessera v0.1 does not yet ship.

What is Tessera

A local daemon owns a single-file SQLite vault that holds five v0.1 context facets:

• identity — stable user facts
• preference — behavioral rules and tool preferences
• workflow — repeated procedures
• project — active work context
• style — writing voice samples

MCP-capable tools connect with scoped capability tokens and call six tools: capture, recall, show, list_facets, stats, and forget. A bare recall searches every facet type the token can read, then returns a budgeted cross-facet bundle.

The lead user is the AI-native developer who wants durable context across Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Codex, local model workflows, and custom harnesses without handing memory to a hosted service.

Where to read, by role

If you want to	Read
Pitch to a colleague or evaluate whether this is interesting	docs/pitch.md
Understand the market position, category claim, and trade-offs	docs/system-overview.md
Understand the architecture, schema, retrieval pipeline, encryption	docs/system-design.md
Understand the SWCR retrieval algorithm and its ablation bar	docs/swcr-spec.md
Understand the security model and threat analysis	docs/threat-model.md
Understand how migrations are safe	docs/migration-contract.md
Understand how debuggability works without telemetry	docs/determinism-and-observability.md
Know what ships in v0.1, v0.3, v0.5, v1.0	docs/release-spec.md
Know what will never ship	docs/non-goals.md
Review the load-bearing decisions	docs/adr/

Posture

This is a solo-developer craft project by Tom Mathews, paced by evening and weekend velocity while a dissertation on agentic memory systems lands in parallel. The v0.1 commitment is explicit; v0.3 and beyond are contingent on real-user signal. There is no telemetry, no hosted service in v0.1, and no model reselling ever. See docs/non-goals.md for the full list of things Tessera will not become.

The reason this exists is that the substrate-change problem is real for a narrow but growing audience (long-running autonomous agents, developers running custom harnesses), the engineering shape is interesting, and the existing products in the space all miss the framing.

License

Apache 2.0. No CLA.