Content
# memgrep
Grep your memory. memgrep gives your coding agents a global, searchable, fully local memory of every chat you've ever had with them, across every project and every tool, plus embedded semantic search you can build into your own apps.
- **Your context survives beyond chats.** Agent sessions die; what you learned in them shouldn't. memgrep ingests chat history from Cursor, Claude Code, and Kiro into one memory, and serves it back to any MCP-capable agent mid-task.
- **Fully local.** Embeddings run on-device via [Transformers.js](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.js) (Hugging Face models, ONNX/WASM). No API keys, no cloud, no data leaving your machine. That matters, because your chat history contains your code.
- **Real infrastructure, zero servers.** SQLite for records, [hnswlib](https://github.com/yoshoku/hnswlib-node) HNSW for fast approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval. One folder is a complete, portable memory.
## Demo

## Why
You solved a tricky auth bug with an agent three weeks ago, in another project, in a different editor. Today's agent has no idea that ever happened. The knowledge exists (your tools keep transcripts on disk) but it is siloed per project, per tool, and invisible to search.
memgrep turns that pile of transcripts into one queryable memory. You ask in plain language ("how did we fix the recon variance?"), it finds the conversation where that happened, and either you or your agent pulls the whole thing back into context.
## Quickstart
```bash
npm install -g memgrep
memgrep ingest # index your chat history (one-time scan, then incremental)
memgrep recall "how did we fix the auth race?" # search memory
memgrep copy # top hit -> clipboard
```
Requires Node.js 18+. Native addons (hnswlib, better-sqlite3) build on install. The embedding model (~25 MB) downloads once on first run; everything after that is offline. Full command list below.
## Agent memory
**Two ways to get things in:** `ingest` pulls chats from your tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Kiro). `remember` stores a note you write yourself (a decision, a postmortem, context no transcript captured).
**Search and browse:** `recall` finds chats by meaning. `list` shows what's stored. `show` / `copy` read one chat back out.
```bash
memgrep scan [--source kiro] [--new] [--last <n>] # list on-disk chats (* = not ingested)
memgrep ingest [--source cursor,claude,kiro] # ingest from supported tools
memgrep ingest --pick 2,5 # ingest by number from last scan
memgrep ingest --last [n] # most recent n chat(s)
memgrep ingest <file...> # one file (format auto-detected)
memgrep remember "we chose X over Y because Z" # manual note (no transcript needed)
memgrep list [--project <p>]
memgrep recall "<query>" [-k <n>]
memgrep show <id>
memgrep copy [id]
memgrep delete <id>
memgrep delete --all [--yes]
```
Memory lives in `~/.memgrep` (`MEMGREP_HOME` to override). Re-running `ingest` is idempotent: unchanged chats are skipped, grown chats are replaced. `scan` then `--pick` lets you see what's available before embedding anything.
Supported history sources:
| Tool | Source | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Cursor | `~/.cursor/projects/*/agent-transcripts/` | Full user + assistant turns |
| Claude Code | `~/.claude/projects/*/*.jsonl` | Full user + assistant turns |
| Kiro IDE | Kiro `globalStorage` workspace sessions | User turns and titles (assistant output lives in opaque execution records) |
| Antigravity | Not yet | Conversations are encrypted protobuf (`.pb`); agents can still *query* memory via MCP |
| Anything else | `memgrep remember "<text>"` | Manual notes, decisions, postmortems |
New sources are pluggable: implement the two-method `TranscriptSource` interface and pass it to `ingestTranscripts`.
### Give your agents access (MCP)
Memory is exposed through MCP, so it works in any MCP-capable agent: Cursor, Claude Code, Kiro, Antigravity, Windsurf, Codex, and whatever ships next. Ingest with the CLI, recall from anywhere. Register the server once per tool:
```json
{
"mcpServers": {
"memgrep": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "memgrep", "serve"]
}
}
}
```
Config locations: Cursor `~/.cursor/mcp.json`, Claude Code `claude mcp add memgrep -- npx -y memgrep serve`, Kiro `~/.kiro/settings/mcp.json`, Antigravity via its MCP settings UI.
The agent gets three tools: `recall(query)`, `get_chat(id)`, and `list_chats(project?)`. Retrieval finds which chat matters; the agent pulls the full transcript into context. An agent in Kiro can recall a fix from a Cursor chat last month.
## File search
Semantic grep over any folder, fully offline:
```bash
npx memgrep index ./docs
npx memgrep search "how do I configure auth?"
```
```text
docs/authentication.md (score 0.712)
Configure auth by setting AUTH_SECRET in your environment and...
```
Options: `--out` / `--index` to choose the index directory (default `.memgrep`), `--model` to pick any [Transformers.js-compatible embedding model](https://huggingface.co/models?library=transformers.js&pipeline_tag=feature-extraction), `-k` for the number of results.
## Library usage
The same engine is available as an embeddable library. Think SQLite for semantic search: not a database server, not an API, not a subscription.
```typescript
import { VectorIndex } from 'memgrep';
// Downloads the model on first use, cached afterwards.
const index = await VectorIndex.create({ model: 'Xenova/all-MiniLM-L6-v2' });
await index.add([
{ id: 'doc1', text: 'To reset your password, click the forgot password link.' },
{ id: 'doc2', text: 'Our refund policy allows returns within 30 days.', metadata: { url: '/refunds' } },
]);
const hits = await index.search('I forgot my login', { k: 5 });
// [{ id: 'doc1', score: 0.62, chunk: 'To reset your password...', chunkIndex: 0 }]
await index.save('./my-index'); // persist
const loaded = await VectorIndex.load('./my-index'); // reload later
```
Long documents are automatically split into overlapping chunks (configurable via `chunkSize` / `chunkOverlap`); `search` returns the best-matching chunk per document. `remove(id)` deletes a document, and re-`add`ing an existing id replaces it.
| Method | Description |
| --- | --- |
| `VectorIndex.create(options?)` | New empty index. Options: `model`, `chunkSize`, `chunkOverlap`, `initialCapacity`. |
| `VectorIndex.load(dir)` | Load a saved index. |
| `index.add(doc \| docs)` | Add or replace documents (`{ id, text, metadata? }`). |
| `index.search(query, { k? })` | Top-k documents by cosine similarity. |
| `index.remove(id)` | Remove a document. |
| `index.save(dir)` | Persist to a directory. |
| `index.size` | Number of documents. |
The memory layer is exported too: `MemoryStore`, `ingestTranscripts`, and the per-tool parsers.
## Bring your own database
If you already have a vector database (pgvector, Supabase, LanceDB, Qdrant), you can use memgrep purely as a local embedding pipeline and skip the built-in index. `Embedder` and `chunkText` are exported for exactly this: chunk your text, embed it on-device, and store the vectors wherever you like.
```typescript
import { Embedder, chunkText } from 'memgrep';
import pg from 'pg';
const embedder = await Embedder.create('Xenova/all-MiniLM-L6-v2');
const db = new pg.Pool();
// Index: chunk, embed locally, insert into pgvector.
const chunks = chunkText(article.body);
const vectors = await embedder.embed(chunks);
for (let i = 0; i < chunks.length; i++) {
await db.query(
'INSERT INTO chunks (article_id, chunk_index, text, embedding) VALUES ($1, $2, $3, $4)',
[article.id, i, chunks[i], JSON.stringify(vectors[i])],
);
}
// Search: embed the query the same way, let the database rank.
const queryVector = await embedder.embedOne('how do refunds work?');
const { rows } = await db.query(
'SELECT text, 1 - (embedding <=> $1) AS score FROM chunks ORDER BY embedding <=> $1 LIMIT 5',
[JSON.stringify(queryVector)],
);
```
Vectors are L2-normalized, so cosine distance (pgvector's `<=>`) is the right operator. `embedder.dimensions` tells you the column size for your schema (384 for the default model). The one rule: always embed queries with the same model you indexed with.
## How it works
The mental model: **chunks are what's searched, chats are what's returned.**
1. Transcripts are parsed into clean `User:/Assistant:` dialogue. Tool output, diffs, and system context are stripped; only the conversation is kept.
2. That text is chunked at paragraph/sentence boundaries (~1000 chars, 200 overlap), and each chunk is embedded locally into a 384-dim vector (Transformers.js, mean pooling, L2-normalized). Titles, projects, and dates are stored as plain columns, not embedded.
3. Vectors go into an HNSW index (cosine space); chat records and chunk text live in SQLite.
4. A query is embedded the same way, the nearest chunks are retrieved (over-fetched 4x, deduplicated to the best chunk per chat), and results come back with scores and the matching passage.
5. Ingestion is idempotent by content hash; `remember` and `ingest` both land in the same searchable memory.
Reliability: SQLite is the source of truth and the vector index is a rebuildable cache. If a process dies mid-ingest (Ctrl-C, crash, power loss), no chats are lost: the next command that needs vectors (`recall`, `ingest`, `serve`) detects the divergence, re-embeds whatever is missing, and repairs the index, printing progress while it does. Commands that never touch vectors (`list`, `show`, `copy`, `delete`, `scan`) skip the repair and stay fast no matter what state the index is in. Deleting `index.bin` entirely just triggers a full rebuild from the database.
## Limitations, honestly
- **Exact identifiers are semantic search's weak spot.** "merchant 7712" matches by the meaning of surrounding words, not the literal string. Hybrid keyword boosting is on the roadmap.
- **Kiro ingestion is partial** (user turns and titles; assistant output lives in opaque execution records). **Antigravity can't be ingested** (encrypted protobuf), though its agents can still query memory via MCP. Escape hatch for both: export or paste into a file and `memgrep ingest <file>`.
- **`delete` is not permanent against re-ingest.** If the source transcript still exists on disk, the next scan re-adds it. Wipe the transcript too, or don't re-scan that source.
- **One writer at a time.** Concurrent memgrep processes can race on the index file; the self-heal repairs any loss on next open, but there is no cross-process lock yet.
- **Recall quality tracks what was said.** Sessions where the signal lived in tool output (which is stripped) search poorly. A one-line `memgrep remember` in your own words is often the highest-value thing you can store.
## Roadmap
- Hybrid search (keyword/BM25 boost for exact ids and error strings)
- Tombstones so `delete` survives re-ingest
- More sources (Antigravity if its format opens up, Codex CLI, Windsurf)
- Watch mode / background daemon for continuous ingest
- Browser support for the library via a WASM HNSW index
## Development
```bash
npm install
npm run build # compile TypeScript
npm test # unit + integration tests (first run downloads the model)
```
## License
[MIT](LICENSE)
MCP Config
Below is the configuration for this MCP Server. You can copy it directly to Cursor or other MCP clients.
mcp.json
Connection Info
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