Tulving

The context-budget engine for AI agents.

Status: v0.1 feature-complete — in pre-release verification. Installable from source today; the name-holding PyPI release is 0.0.1 while v0.1.0 goes through final testing.

Tulving is a model-agnostic Python SDK that gives an AI agent persistent, structured, searchable working memory — and, as its headline capability, curates that memory back into a fixed token budget:

ctx = memory.curate("resuming work on the auth refactor", token_budget=4000)
print(ctx.content)          # a prompt-ready block, already redacted, within budget
print(ctx.token_count, ctx.budget_remaining, ctx.sources_consulted)

curate() selects, ranks, decays, and trims your agent's memories into a block that fits the budget you hand it — so you spend context tokens on what matters instead of dumping a whole store into the prompt. curate(mode="orient") produces a cold-start briefing for a fresh session.

Named after Endel Tulving, the psychologist who established that memory has types (episodic vs semantic). Typed memories — facts, decisions, observations, plans, summaries, each with its own lifecycle — are Tulving's core data model.

Zero infrastructure: one SQLite file, no server, no API key required. Vectors are optional.

📖 New here? Read the User Guide — using Tulving with LM Studio, Claude Code, and the MCP Inspector; verifying it works; and measuring the value it adds over no memory.

Install

Requires Python 3.11+.

pip install tulving                 # core engine (stdlib + hnswlib only)

Optional extras:

pip install "tulving[local]"        # local embeddings (sentence-transformers)
pip install "tulving[openai]"       # OpenAI embeddings
pip install "tulving[anthropic]"    # Claude LLM for session summaries
pip install "tulving[mcp]"          # MCP server for Claude Code

The core engine works with no embedder (key-exact lookup + importance/recency curation). Add [local] or [openai] to enable semantic search.

Quickstart

from tulving import Memory, MemoryType

memory = Memory("./agent_memory", agent_id="my-agent")

# Store typed memories. A repeated key supersedes the old entry (never raises).
memory.store(
    "We chose SQLite over Postgres for zero-infra local deployment.",
    type=MemoryType.DECISION,
    key="decision:datastore",
    tags=["architecture"],
)
memory.store("The auth token TTL is 15 minutes.", type=MemoryType.FACT)

# Exact recall by key.
entry = memory.get("decision:datastore")
print(entry.content)

# Curate into a token budget — the headline primitive.
ctx = memory.curate("what did we decide about storage?", token_budget=2000)
print(ctx.content)

Enable semantic search by passing an embedder:

from tulving import Memory, LocalEmbedder      # pip install "tulving[local]"

memory = Memory("./agent_memory", embedding_adapter=LocalEmbedder())
results = memory.search("database choice", top_k=5)
for r in results:
    print(f"{r.score:.2f}  {r.match_type}  {r.entry.content}")

Typed memories

Importance is computed lazily on read (base_importance * 0.5^(age / half_life[type])). Nothing is ever destroyed — low-importance entries are archived, not deleted, and DECISION/pinned entries survive eviction.

MCP server (Claude Code & other MCP clients)

Tulving ships a thin, local-only (stdio, no network) MCP server exposing six tools: memory_store, memory_get, memory_search, memory_curate, memory_forget, memory_list_keys (orient = memory_curate(mode="orient")).

pip install "tulving[mcp,local]"
tulving-mcp --memory-path ./agent_memory --embedding local

Register it with Claude Code (.mcp.json or your MCP client config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tulving": {
      "command": "tulving-mcp",
      "args": ["--memory-path", "./agent_memory", "--embedding", "local"]
    }
  }
}

Flags fall back to env vars (TULVING_MEMORY_PATH, TULVING_EMBEDDING_ADAPTER, TULVING_LLM_ADAPTER, TULVING_LLM_MODEL, TULVING_DEFAULT_TOKEN_BUDGET). --llm claude enables session summaries (needs [anthropic] + ANTHROPIC_API_KEY); with no LLM the server degrades loudly to deterministic markers. A second process on the same path is refused (single-writer safety, ADR-015).

Export / import

Full JSON round-trip for backup, migration, or sharing. Exports are an emission surface: redaction is on by default (secret-shaped tokens and sensitive keys are masked), with a loud keyword-only opt-out for trusted backups.

# By default the export file must live inside the memory directory; pass
# allowed_root to write elsewhere (leaf names are whitelisted, dirs contained).
memory.export_json("backup.json", allowed_root=".")                  # redacted, sharing-safe
memory.export_json("backup.json", allowed_root=".",
                   include_sensitive=True, include_archived=True)    # full plaintext backup

report = memory.import_json("backup.json", on_key_conflict="skip")   # or "supersede"
print(report.entries_imported, report.entries_reembedded, report.warnings)

Imported entries are re-embedded (unless the embedding model matches exactly) and their IDs/reference graph are consistently remapped.

What v0.1 ships

• Core memory engine — store / get / semantic search over typed memories; upsert-by-key supersede; zero infrastructure (one SQLite file, local vectors optional).
• Token-budget curation — curate(query, token_budget) + orient mode.
• Lazy decay & eviction — per-type importance decay; decisions/pinned never evicted; archive, never destroy.
• Sessions — per-agent session tracking, end-of-session summarization, abandoned-session recovery on startup.
• MCP server — six tools, single-writer safety, loud llm=None degradation.
• Adapters & export — pluggable embeddings (local/openai) and LLM (anthropic); JSON round-trip export/import with default-on redaction.

Deferred to later versions (see docs/adrs/adr-016): knowledge graph, multi-agent machinery, semantic contradiction detection, Postgres backend, and additional export formats.

Development

git clone https://github.com/govanxa/tulving.git
cd tulving
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate     # Windows: .venv\Scripts\activate
pip install -e ".[dev,mcp]"

pytest                                    # full suite
pytest --cov=tulving --cov-report=term-missing
mypy tulving/                             # strict
ruff check tulving/ tests/ && ruff format --check tulving/ tests/

CI runs these same gates plus a cross-platform test matrix (Linux + Windows × Python 3.11–3.13) on every push — see .github/workflows/ci.yml.

The User Guide covers real-world usage (LM Studio, Claude Code, MCP Inspector), behavior verification, and how to measure Tulving against having no memory at all.

By the same author: Kairos (kairos-ai) — contract-enforced AI workflows. A kairos-ai-tulving integration plugin is planned.

License

Apache 2.0