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SOTA-level agent memory at zero infrastructure cost.

Project description

TrueMemory

A living memory system for AI agents. Long-horizon recall on commodity hardware.

PyPI Python License LoCoMo Score LongMemEval Score BEAM Score

What is TrueMemory? · Quick Start · Edge / Base / Pro · Architecture · Benchmarks · API · FAQ


💡 What is TrueMemory?

  • Remembers everything across sessions. Facts, preferences, decisions, corrections. Your AI finally knows who you are.
  • 93.0% on LoCoMo, 92.0% on LongMemEval, SOTA on BEAM-1M. Beats every live-retrieval memory system across three major benchmarks. Independently reproducible.
  • Runs locally on a single SQLite file. Zero cloud, zero API keys for Edge and Base tiers. Your memories never leave your machine.
  • Neuroscience-inspired architecture. Six retrieval layers plus an encoding gate that filters noise from signal before anything gets stored.
  • Works with Claude Code and Claude Desktop. Four lifecycle hooks capture conversations automatically. No manual work needed.

🚀 Quick Start

Claude Code / Claude Desktop

One command. Works on any Mac or Linux box, even if your system Python is old or missing entirely.

Step 1. Open Terminal:

  • Mac: press Cmd + Space, type Terminal, press Enter
  • Linux: press Ctrl + Alt + T (or open your distro's terminal app)

Step 2. Paste this one line and press Enter:

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/buildingjoshbetter/TrueMemory/main/install.sh | sh

Step 3. Wait ~3-5 minutes while it downloads and installs (up to 15-30 minutes on slower connections). The installer pre-downloads models for all three tiers (Edge, Base, Pro) so you can switch between them instantly later.

Step 4. If Claude Desktop was already open, quit it with Cmd+Q and reopen it (a new chat window is not enough; the config is only read at launch). Then start a new Claude session and type "Set up TrueMemory". TrueMemory walks you through choosing Edge, Base, or Pro.

Switching tiers later? Just tell Claude "switch to Base" or "switch to Pro" in any session. All models are pre-installed, so switching is instant (if you have existing memories, they will be re-embedded with the new model, which may take a moment). Pro requires an LLM API key for HyDE query expansion.

Updating to the latest version? Run uv tool upgrade truememory in your terminal. Then restart Claude.

What this actually does: installs uv (Astral's Python tool manager) if needed, fetches a managed Python 3.12 into ~/.local/share/uv/, installs TrueMemory with all tier models into an isolated tool environment, registers the MCP server, wires up lifecycle hooks, and merges instructions into your ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. Your system Python is never touched. No sudo, no venvs, no pip struggle. Uninstall cleanly with uv tool uninstall truememory.

Want to audit the script first? It's ~200 lines of shell, no sudo, stays entirely under $HOME. Read the source at install.sh, or download and inspect locally: curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/buildingjoshbetter/TrueMemory/main/install.sh -o install.sh && less install.sh && sh install.sh.

Python library (for developers)

If you're embedding TrueMemory in your own Python project (requires Python 3.10+):

pip install truememory

Important: pip install installs the Python library only. It does NOT register the MCP server, install hooks, or configure Claude. For Claude Code / Claude Desktop, always use the curl | sh installer above.

from truememory import Memory

m = Memory()
m.add("Prefers dark mode and TypeScript", user_id="alex")
m.add("Allergic to peanuts", user_id="alex")

results = m.search("What are Alex's preferences?", user_id="alex")
print(results[0]["content"])
# "Prefers dark mode and TypeScript"

The database is created automatically at ~/.truememory/memories.db.


🏗️ Edge / Base / Pro

Same architecture, three tiers. Trade off install size and hardware for accuracy.

Edge Base Pro
LoCoMo (3-run mean) 89.6% 92.0% 93.0%
LongMemEval (3-run mean) 92.0%
BEAM-1M (3-run mean) 76.6% (SOTA)
BEAM-10M (single run) 65.0%
Embedder Model2Vec potion-base-8M (8M params, 256d) Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B (600M params, 256d) Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B (600M params, 256d)
Reranker MiniLM-L-6-v2 (22M) gte-reranker-modernbert (149M) gte-reranker-modernbert (149M)
HyDE off off on (requires LLM API key)
Runs on Any machine, CPU only 4GB+ RAM, CPU or GPU 4GB+ RAM + LLM API key
Install size ~30MB ~1.5GB ~1.5GB

Edge works everywhere. Base is the strongest fully-offline tier. Pro adds HyDE query expansion for the highest scores.


🧠 Architecture

TrueMemory uses a 6-layer retrieval pipeline inspired by how the brain encodes and recalls memory, plus an encoding gate that decides what gets stored.

Ingest (what gets stored)

Ingest Pipeline

Every conversation flows through three stages before anything is stored:

Stage What it does
LLM Extractor Pulls atomic facts from raw conversation text. Classifies each as personal, preference, decision, correction, temporal, technical, or relationship.
Encoding Gate Three-signal filter: compression novelty + speech-act salience + embedding pair-diff prediction error. Rejects noise, keeps signal.
Dedup ADD / UPDATE / SKIP against existing memories using vector similarity + word-overlap Jaccard matching. Prevents duplicates and catches rephrased versions of the same fact.

Encoding Gate + Storage

Encoding Gate

Three signals decide whether a fact gets stored or skipped:

Signal What it measures
Compression Novelty gzip-based information gain. How much new information does this fact add compared to what's already stored?
Speech-Act Salience Rule-based scorer for short messages, learned scorer for longer text. Filters out greetings, reactions, and filler.
Embedding Pair-Diff Embedding divergence between the message and existing memories on the same topic. Detects when someone says something different about a known subject.

The weighted sum of all three must exceed a threshold (default 0.30) to be stored. Everything below gets skipped. One SQLite file at ~/.truememory/memories.db. Portable. Backupable. cp it anywhere.

Retrieve (how it answers)

Retrieval Pipeline

When you ask a question, six layers work together:

Layer Name What it does
L0 Personality Char-n-gram style vectors + entity profiles. Answers "what kind of person is X?" questions that keyword search can't touch.
L2 Episodic FTS5 full-text keyword search with temporal filtering. Fast, broad recall.
L3 Semantic Dense vector search (Model2Vec or Qwen3 by tier) + RRF fusion + cross-encoder reranking. The heavy lifter.
L4 Salience Noise filtering + entity boosting. Learned 13-feature logistic regression scorer trained on retrieval-utility labels.
L5 Consolidation Structured fact summaries, contradiction resolution, and surprise-weighted reranking (alpha=0.2).
+ Reranker Cross-encoder reranking (MiniLM or gte-modernbert by tier) for final precision.

🔬 Benchmarks

LoCoMo Benchmark Leaderboard

Tested on LoCoMo (1,540 questions, 10 conversations), LongMemEval (500 questions, multi-session), BEAM-1M (700 questions, 35 conversations at 1M+ tokens), and BEAM-10M (200 questions, 10 conversations at 10M tokens). All systems share the same answer model (GPT-4.1-mini), judge (GPT-4o-mini, 3x majority vote), and scoring pipeline.

LoCoMo (3-run validated means)

Tier Overall Single-hop Multi-hop Temporal Open-domain
Edge 89.6% 88.7% 88.5% 79.2% 91.4%
Base 92.0% 91.5% 91.3% 82.3% 93.9%
Pro 93.0% 92.6% 90.0% 86.5% 95.4%

BEAM-1M (Pro tier, 3-run mean)

Category Score
Preference following 97.1%
Contradiction resolution 91.4%
Information extraction 91.4%
Summarization 89.5%
Instruction following 84.8%
Abstention 82.4%
Knowledge update 77.6%
Multi-session reasoning 67.1%
Temporal reasoning 64.8%
Event ordering 19.5%
Overall 76.6%

LongMemEval (Pro tier, 3-run mean)

Variant Accuracy Correct/500
Oracle 92.0% 460
Strict (_s) 87.8% 439

BEAM-10M (Pro tier, single run)

Overall 65.0% (130/200)
GPU A100 80GB
Conversations 10 at 10M tokens (~20K messages each)

Accuracy vs Infrastructure Cost

Reproduce any result yourself

Every benchmark script is self-contained and runs on Modal.

Evaluation config

All benchmarks use the same eval pipeline. Nothing is hidden.

Parameter LoCoMo LongMemEval BEAM-1M BEAM-10M
Dataset 10 convs, 1,540 Qs 500 Qs, multi-session 35 convs at 1M tokens, 700 Qs 10 convs at 10M tokens, 200 Qs
Answer model gpt-4.1-mini gpt-4.1-mini gpt-4.1-mini gpt-4.1-mini
Answer temp 0 0 0 0
Judge model gpt-4o-mini gpt-4o-mini gpt-4o-mini gpt-4o-mini
Judge voting 3x majority 3x majority 3x majority 3x majority
Retrieval top-k 100 100 100 100
Compute Modal T4 Modal A10G Modal T4 Modal A100 80GB

Full details: LoCoMo | LongMemEval | BEAM


🐍 Python API

from truememory import Memory

m = Memory()

# Store
m.add("Prefers dark mode and TypeScript", user_id="alex")
m.add("Allergic to peanuts", user_id="alex")
m.add("Works at Anthropic as a senior engineer", user_id="alex")

# Search
results = m.search("What are Alex's preferences?", user_id="alex")

# Deep search (multi-round, higher accuracy, slower)
results = m.search_deep("What do we know about Alex's career?", user_id="alex")
Method Description
m.add(content, sender, recipient, timestamp, category) Store a memory
m.search(query, user_id, limit) Search memories
m.search_deep(query, user_id, limit) Multi-round agentic search (slower, higher accuracy)
m.get(id) Get a specific memory by ID
m.get_all(user_id) Get all memories for a user
m.update(id, content) Update a memory
m.delete(id) Delete a memory
m.delete_all(user_id) Delete all memories for a user

❓ FAQ

My session doesn't seem to know anything about me. What's wrong?

On your first session, TrueMemory runs setup. It won't recall memories until setup is complete. After that, every new session automatically searches your memory and injects up to 25 relevant facts as context. If memories still aren't loading, check that the MCP server is connected (truememory_stats) and that you have memories stored (truememory_search with a broad query).

Where is my data stored? Is anything sent to the cloud?

Everything lives locally in a single SQLite file at ~/.truememory/memories.db. Edge and Base tiers make zero external network calls. Pro tier sends only your search query text to an LLM API for HyDE expansion. Your memories themselves are never transmitted. Back up anytime with cp ~/.truememory/memories.db backup.db.

How do I switch tiers (Edge → Base → Pro)?

Call truememory_configure(tier="base") (or "pro") in any session. TrueMemory will automatically download the new models and re-embed all your existing memories. Base/Pro require pip install "truememory[gpu]" for the larger models. Pro also needs an API key for HyDE query expansion.

I switched tiers and search results seem off. How do I fix it?

After a tier switch, TrueMemory re-embeds all memories with the new model. If this was interrupted, run truememory_configure(tier="...") again to retry. If results are still degraded, you can delete ~/.truememory/memories.db and start fresh. Your conversations are still in your chat history and will be re-extracted.

Do I need Python installed?

No. The recommended install (curl -LsSf .../install.sh | sh) uses uv to manage a sandboxed Python 3.12. Your system Python is never touched. To uninstall cleanly: uv tool uninstall truememory.


Find me on X @Building_Josh · Follow us @Sauron_Labs


📝 Citation

@software{truememory,
  title = {TrueMemory: Neuroscience-Inspired Persistent Memory for AI Agents},
  author = {Building\_Josh},
  organization = {Sauron},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/buildingjoshbetter/TrueMemory},
  version = {0.6.0}
}

⚖️ License

Licensed under AGPL-3.0. Free for personal and research use. Commercial use requires a separate license. Contact josh@sauronlabs.ai.


TrueMemory, a sauron company · sauronlabs.ai

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