@event4u/agent-memory

Persistent, trust-scored project memory for AI coding agents — MCP server + CLI, backed by PostgreSQL + pgvector.

Status: V1 complete · 251 tests passing · Node ≥ 20 · Postgres 15+ with pgvector

60-second quick-start

What it is. A durable, trust-scored memory store your coding agent can write to and query over MCP or HTTP-style CLI — so the LLM stops forgetting your architecture decisions between sessions.

Run it (no Node install on the host required):

curl -o docker-compose.yml \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/event4u-app/agent-memory/main/docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d agent-memory

Prefer a ready-made reference stack? Clone event4u-app/with-agent-memory — minimal Docker Compose + smoke test, zero editing required.

Check it. One command verifies the DB, pgvector, and migrations:

docker compose exec agent-memory memory doctor
# → 4 ok · 1 warn · 0 fail · 0 skipped   (exit 0)

Query it. Every command emits JSON. Pipe it into jq, or into your agent:

docker compose exec agent-memory memory retrieve "how are invoices calculated?"

Integrate it. agent-memory is stack-agnostic — it runs as a Docker sidecar next to any application, as a Node library when you want direct calls, or as a standalone CLI from any language that can spawn a subprocess. Pick the guide that matches how you want to talk to it:

• Any language / shell → docs/consumer-setup-generic.md
• Docker sidecar (recommended — works with any stack) → docs/consumer-setup-docker-sidecar.md
• Node / TypeScript (programmatic API) → docs/consumer-setup-node.md
• Any MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Augment…) → point it at command: docker, args: ["compose", "exec", "-i", "agent-memory", "memory", "mcp"]

Why

LLMs forget. They hallucinate project facts. They restate preferences you corrected last week. agent-memory gives your agent a durable, trust-scored memory of your project — architecture decisions, bug patterns, coding conventions — with automatic decay, evidence-gated promotion, and invalidation when code changes.

What you get

• 26 MCP tools — any agent that speaks MCP (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, Augment…) can retrieve, ingest, invalidate, and promote memory.
• 25 CLI commands — pure JSON on stdout, safe for scripts and CI.
• 4-tier memory — Working → Episodic → Semantic → Procedural, auto-consolidated at session end.
• Evidence-gated promotion — nothing enters validated without passing gate criteria (file/symbol exists, diff impact, tests linked).
• Ebbinghaus decay — memories fade unless used; ADRs never decay.
• Privacy filter — strips secrets, API keys, PII before anything hits the DB.

Non-goals

To keep expectations honest:

• Not a general-purpose vector database. It is scoped specifically to agent-facing project knowledge with trust scoring, decay, and invalidation. If you need raw similarity search over arbitrary data, use a dedicated vector DB.
• Not a pretrained model or dataset. Memories are authored by your agents and humans — nothing ships preloaded.
• Not a SaaS. The whole thing runs in your infrastructure (Docker sidecar, or embedded as a Node library). No hosted tier.
• Not a replacement for project documentation. README, ADRs, and architecture docs still belong in your repo. Memory complements them, it does not replace them.

Integrate with your project

agent-memory does not care what language your application is written in. Pick the transport that fits how your code already talks to external tools, then follow the matching guide.

Transport	Guide	Works for	Runnable example
Docker sidecar + CLI	docs/consumer-setup-docker-sidecar.md	any language that can shell out	examples/laravel-sidecar/
Node programmatic API	docs/consumer-setup-node.md	Node / TypeScript apps	examples/node-programmatic/
MCP stdio	docs/consumer-setup-generic.md	any MCP-aware agent client	—
MCP over HTTP/SSE	docs/mcp-http.md	remote agents (GitHub Actions, Slack webhooks, browser playgrounds)	—

Need a quick language-neutral overview first? Start at docs/consumer-setup-generic.md.

Both runnable examples boot with a single docker compose up -d and end with a working memory health → status: ok.

Installation

As a dev dependency (recommended)

agent-memory is primarily a development-time tool — it stores what an AI coding agent learns about your repository, and its surface area (CLI, MCP server, Postgres sidecar) is scoped to engineers and their agents. Install it as a dev dependency so it stays out of production bundles:

npm install --save-dev @event4u/agent-memory

You must also provide Postgres with pgvector. Easiest path — copy the bundled docker-compose:

curl -o docker-compose.yml \
  https://raw.githubusercontent.com/event4u-app/agent-memory/main/examples/consumer-docker-compose.yml
docker compose up -d postgres

See examples/ for ready-to-copy docker-compose.yml and GitHub Actions snippets.

Using it in production

Production use is supported but not the default target. If you ship agent-memory as part of a running service (e.g. a backend that queries its own memory at runtime), install it as a regular dependency instead:

npm install @event4u/agent-memory

Everything documented in this README applies the same way — only the dependency scope changes.

From source (development)

git clone https://github.com/event4u-app/agent-memory.git
cd agent-memory
npm install
docker compose up -d postgres
npm run db:migrate
npm test

Quick start

# 1. Start Postgres (local dev)
docker compose up -d postgres

# 2. Run migrations
npm run db:migrate

# 3. Smoke test — returns JSON { status: "ok", features: [...] }
npx tsx src/cli/index.ts health

# 4. Ingest a memory
npx tsx src/cli/index.ts ingest \
  --type architecture_decision \
  --title "Use event sourcing for orders" \
  --summary "All order state changes go through domain events." \
  --repository my-app

# 5. Retrieve
npx tsx src/cli/index.ts retrieve "how do orders work?"

After npm run build + npm install -g . the memory binary is on your PATH.

Environment

The five variables most consumers touch in week one. Everything else has sane defaults — see docs/configuration.md for the full matrix.

Variable	Default	Purpose
DATABASE_URL	postgresql://memory:memory_dev@localhost:5433/agent_memory	Postgres connection string.
REPO_ROOT	process.cwd()	Repo root the file/symbol validators resolve against. Inside the sidecar container this must match the volume mount (typically /workspace).
EMBEDDING_PROVIDER	bm25-only	openai, gemini, voyage, local, or bm25-only — see Embeddings below.
MEMORY_TRUST_THRESHOLD_DEFAULT	0.6	Minimum trust_score surfaced by retrieval. Lower to see low-trust entries during debugging.
MEMORY_TOKEN_BUDGET	2000	Default progressive-disclosure budget per retrieval call.
MEMORY_ENTROPY_THRESHOLD	4.5	Shannon-entropy cutoff (bits/char) for the residual HIGH_ENTROPY_DETECTED heuristic. Calibrated against the corpus in tests/fixtures/entropy-corpus/ — see docs/security/entropy-calibration.md.
MEMORY_ENTROPY_MIN_LENGTH	20	Minimum quoted-string length (chars) before the entropy heuristic fires.
MEMORY_AUTO_MIGRATE	true (Docker image)	Container entrypoint runs memory migrate on startup. Set to false for ephemeral CLI containers or externally managed schemas. Host installs run memory migrate manually.

A ready-to-copy template lives in .env.example.

Embeddings

Retrieval ranks results by fusing lexical (BM25) and semantic (vector) scores via RRF. The semantic half plugs in via EMBEDDING_PROVIDER:

Provider	Status	Leaves your network?	When to pick it
bm25-only (default)	implemented	no	Zero-config onboarding, air-gapped installs, or when lexical recall is enough.
openai	implemented	yes — ingested text is sent to OpenAI	Best general-purpose quality; requires OPENAI_API_KEY.
gemini	scaffolded, falls back to bm25-only	yes (when implemented)	Tracked for a future release. Set GEMINI_API_KEY; runtime currently logs a warning and uses bm25-only.
voyage	scaffolded, falls back to bm25-only	yes (when implemented)	Same as gemini. Set VOYAGE_API_KEY.
local	reserved for on-device model, not yet implemented	no	Placeholder today; currently resolves to bm25-only.

See the provider chain source for the exact fallback rules. The privacy filter (src/ingestion/privacy-filter.ts) strips secrets, API keys, and detected PII before text is sent to any provider — but operators picking openai (or a future network-bound provider) should treat memory content as "leaves the network". Full env matrix in docs/configuration.md.

Connect to your AI agent

Every MCP-aware agent works. Two options, pick by what you already have:

Option A — Docker sidecar (recommended, no Node install)

Works for any project regardless of language. Assumes you ran docker compose up -d agent-memory from the 60-second quick-start.

~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "agent-memory": {
      "command": "docker",
      "args": ["compose", "-f", "/abs/path/to/your/project/docker-compose.yml",
               "exec", "-i", "agent-memory", "memory", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

REPO_ROOT with the sidecar. docker-compose.yml already sets REPO_ROOT=/workspace inside the container (matching the .:/workspace bind mount) — do not pass a host path here. If you want to override the host mount source, export REPO_ROOT=/host/path/to/repo on the host before docker compose up -d; compose substitutes it into the volume definition without ever reaching the container environment.

Option B — Installed npm binary

After npm install -g @event4u/agent-memory (or npm install --save-dev in a Node-based project), run the MCP server directly:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "agent-memory": {
      "command": "memory",
      "args": ["mcp"],
      "env": {
        "DATABASE_URL": "postgresql://memory:memory_dev@localhost:5433/agent_memory",
        "REPO_ROOT": "/abs/path/to/your/project"
      }
    }
  }
}

Cursor / Cline / Augment

Each agent has its own MCP config file, but the shape is identical to the Claude examples above. Check your agent's docs for the file path; keep command, args, and env as shown.

How it works

Trust lifecycle

flowchart LR
    A[tool / agent] -- propose --> Q[quarantine]
    Q -- gate criteria --> V[validated]
    V -- decay / TTL --> S[stale]
    V -- signature drift --> I[invalidated]
    V -- confirmed wrong --> P[poisoned]
    S -.->|refresh on hit| V
    S --> I
    I --> AR[archived]
    P -- cascade --> AR
    Q -- reject --> R[rejected] --> AR

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Every entry enters quarantine. Gate criteria (≥1 evidence ref, all validators green) promote it to validated. From there it decays on TTL, can be invalidated on code drift, or poisoned if confirmed wrong — with a cascade through entries derived from it.

4-tier memory

flowchart TB
    subgraph Working[Working · session]
        O[observations]
    end
    subgraph Episodic[Episodic · ~30d]
        E[session summaries]
    end
    subgraph Semantic[Semantic · 90d–∞]
        M[validated entries]
    end
    subgraph Procedural[Procedural · ∞]
        R[repeated workflows]
    end
    O -- session end --> E
    E -- consolidation --> M
    M -- recurrence --> R

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Consolidation from Working to Episodic happens at session end; promotion to Semantic is evidence-gated. Procedural entries are never decayed.

ASCII fallback (environments without Mermaid)

propose → quarantine ──gate criteria──▶ validated ──decay/TTL──▶ stale
                                            │                      │
                                         evidence               cascade
                                            ▼                      ▼
                                      invalidated ─────────▶ archived

• Trust-scored, not boolean — every entry has a trust_score (0–1). Retrieval filters by threshold (default 0.6).
• Progressive disclosure — L1 (index) / L2 (summary) / L3 (full) fits retrieval to your token budget.
• Auto-invalidation — git diff between two refs marks linked memories stale; signature drift triggers hard invalidation.
• Rollback — when a memory is confirmed wrong (poison), the cascade marks every derived task for review.

Full details: docs/data-model.md. Unfamiliar term? See the glossary.

Memory types

Nine canonical types cover most project knowledge:

Type	Example
architecture_decision	"Use event sourcing for orders"
domain_rule	"An invoice cannot be modified after issuance"
coding_convention	"All services live in src/services/*, one per file"
bug_pattern	"N+1 query when iterating order.items without with()"
refactoring_note	"Migration from v1 API to v2 in progress — avoid v1 in new code"
integration_constraint	"Stripe webhook timeout is 10s, not 30s"
deployment_warning	"Run migration X before deploying service Y"
test_strategy	"Auth module uses contract tests, not unit tests"
glossary_entry	"'Dispatch' = external partner handoff, not internal queue"

Tools & commands

MCP tools (26)

Category	Tools
Retrieval	memory_retrieve, memory_retrieve_details
Ingestion	memory_ingest, memory_propose, memory_promote
Trust	memory_validate, memory_verify, memory_invalidate, memory_poison, memory_deprecate, memory_explain, memory_history
Session lifecycle	memory_session_start, memory_observe, memory_observe_failure, memory_session_end, memory_stop, memory_run_invalidation
Quality	memory_health, memory_diagnose, memory_audit, memory_review, memory_contradictions, memory_resolve_contradiction, memory_merge_duplicates, memory_prune

CLI commands (25)

retrieve · ingest · propose · promote · validate · invalidate · poison · rollback · verify · health · status · diagnose · audit · explain · history · review · contradictions · policy · export · import · migrate · init · doctor · serve · mcp

Full reference: docs/cli-reference.md.

Typical workflow

# Agent observes a bug fix — create a proposal with evidence
memory propose --type bug_pattern \
  --title "N+1 on invoice list" \
  --summary "Iterating order.items without with('items') triggers N+1." \
  --repository my-app \
  --source "PR#234" --confidence 0.7 \
  --scenario "invoice-export"

# After 3+ future decisions reference it and tests pass → promote
memory promote <proposal-id>

# Later: code change may invalidate it (diff target is always HEAD)
memory invalidate --from-git-diff --from-ref main

# A week later: entry turns out to be wrong — poison + rollback cascade
memory poison <uuid> "reason the entry is wrong"
memory rollback <uuid>

Configuration

All settings have sensible defaults. Essentials:

Variable	Default	Notes
DATABASE_URL	postgresql://memory:memory_dev@localhost:5433/agent_memory	Postgres
REPO_ROOT	cwd	for file / symbol validators
EMBEDDING_PROVIDER	bm25-only	fallback chain to BM25 if no API key
MEMORY_TRUST_THRESHOLD_DEFAULT	0.6	minimum score to be served

Full reference (all env vars, decay overrides, CI examples): docs/configuration.md.

Project structure

src/
├── config.ts            # env → config
├── types.ts             # types, enums, trust lifecycle
├── db/                  # Postgres connection, migrations, repositories
├── retrieval/           # BM25 + vector + RRF + progressive disclosure
├── trust/               # scoring, transitions, validators, promotion, poison
├── ingestion/           # privacy filter, candidate, pipeline, scanners
├── consolidation/       # working → episodic → semantic promotion
├── invalidation/        # git diff, drift, TTL, rollback
├── quality/             # metrics, dedup, contradictions, archival
├── embedding/           # provider abstraction + fallback chain
├── infra/               # circuit breaker, retry
├── mcp/                 # MCP server (stdio), 24 tools
└── cli/                 # commander-based CLI

docs/
├── data-model.md        # Postgres schema, trust lifecycle, tiers, decay
├── glossary.md          # every term with source-of-truth pointer
├── cli-reference.md     # all CLI commands with examples
└── configuration.md     # every env var

examples/
├── consumer-docker-compose.yml
└── consumer-ci.yml

Testing

npm test                 # 251 tests, vitest
npm run test:watch       # watch mode
npm run typecheck        # tsc --noEmit (strict)
npm run lint             # biome check

Compatibility

Runtime dependencies only:

agent-memory	Node	Postgres	Docker
1.1.x (unreleased)	≥ 20	15+ with pgvector	24+ with Compose v2

Every retrieve() and health() response carries contract_version: 1. Callers pinned to v1 MAY continue on a v2 response if they ignore unknown fields; breaking renames bump the major. See the retrieval contract spec.

For the full cross-axis matrix (runtime, contract, companion-package pairings, breaking changes per release) see docs/compatibility-matrix.md.

Optional companion — @event4u/agent-config

agent-memory stands on its own. It can be paired with @event4u/agent-config — a separate package that ships agent behaviour (skills, rules, commands) — and both were designed to combine, but neither depends on the other. Use agent-memory with any agent that speaks MCP or any codebase that can shell out to the CLI.

See docs/integration-agent-config.md for how the two packages combine, or examples/with-agent-config/ for a smoke-tested reference setup.

Changelog

Release history, rename mappings, and upgrade notes live in CHANGELOG.md (Keep-a-Changelog format). Start there when upgrading across minor versions.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for dev setup, coding conventions, commit format (Conventional Commits), and the full verification pipeline that CI runs.

Security

Report vulnerabilities via GitHub's private advisory form, not public issues. Supported versions and disclosure policy are in SECURITY.md.

License

MIT