🧠 mnemex

Your second brain, curated by an LLM. Books in, structured wiki out.

mnemex is a personal knowledge system. You tell an LLM "ingest this book", and it reads the whole thing and files it into a structured, cross-linked wiki of:

• Sources — books, articles, papers (metadata + chapter summaries + extracted claims)

• Entities — the people, companies, and tools mentioned

• Concepts — ideas and frameworks, each with When to use / When NOT to use, cross-links, and a source count

• Syntheses — multi-source theories you derive ("how do these five books on negotiation actually fit together?")

Everything is plain Markdown, version-controlled, locally hosted, and LLM-readable. It's the opposite of RAG: instead of re-discovering knowledge on every query, the wiki compiles knowledge once and keeps it current. Every ingest makes it richer.

Inspired by Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea — made real and turnkey.

Quick start (≈5 minutes)

macOS / Linux:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Daniil-Sokolskiy/mnemex/main/install.sh | bash

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Daniil-Sokolskiy/mnemex/main/install.ps1 | iex

This installs the MCP servers + CLI, scaffolds a wiki at ~/mnemex (%USERPROFILE%\mnemex on Windows), and prints setup instructions for your client — Claude Desktop (paste a config block) or Claude Code (run two claude mcp add commands). These are local servers, so the web app (claude.ai) can't use them directly. Wire up your client, then say:

"help me ingest my first book — Meditations by Marcus Aurelius"

Watch index.md grow as the agent reads the book and files it.

npm install -g @mnemex/library-mcp @mnemex/cli
npx playwright install chromium          # for Anna's Archive search
mnemex init ~/mnemex                  # scaffold the wiki
mnemex doctor                           # verify deps
mnemex mcp install --wiki ~/mnemex    # print setup for Desktop + Claude Code

mnemex mcp install prints copy-paste setup for both Claude Desktop and Claude Code and never edits any config file silently.

On Windows the npm / mnemex commands are identical; install pandoc with winget install JohnMacFarlane.Pandoc, and set up search natively per docs/mcp/search.md (mnemex setup-search is bash-only).

Related MCP server: agent-wiki

What's in the box

Downloading from Anna's: free vs paid

Search always works and needs no account. Downloading has two paths:

The automated path uses Anna's fast_download API, which requires a membership key — that's Anna's restriction, not mnemex's. Free downloads exist but go through the browser slow-download page (mnemex can't fully automate that: there's a wait timer and occasionally a check, and bypassing checks is out of scope). So without a key you still get every search result plus a one-click link to grab the file for free.

Project Gutenberg downloads are always free and fully automated — no key, no browser.

How it works

  you: "ingest Atomic Habits"
        │
        ▼
  library-mcp ──► search Gutenberg + Anna's ──► download ──► raw/books/<slug>/book.md
        │
        ▼
  the LLM agent reads CLAUDE.md, then the book, then:
        ├─ writes wiki/sources/Atomic-Habits-Clear-2018.md
        ├─ creates/updates wiki/entities/  (James-Clear, etc.)
        ├─ creates/updates wiki/concepts/  (Habit-Loop, Identity-Based-Habits, …)
        ├─ updates index.md  (counts + catalog)
        └─ appends log.md

The CLAUDE.md in your wiki root is the agent's operating manual — naming conventions, frontmatter schema, the ingest/query/lint workflows, and the relationship vocabulary (Builds on / Subsumes / Contrasted with …).

Methodology

The wiki structure is opinionated. The patterns that make it scale:

• Two-phase ingest — split content writing (sub-agent) from bookkeeping (parent) to avoid timeouts on big books.

• Cluster ingest — ingest 5 themed books together with cross-link "sibling hooks" so concepts mature fast.

• Status lifecycle — stub → draft → mature (3+ sources, reviewed).

Requirements

• Node.js ≥ 20

• pandoc (epub/pdf → markdown)

• Chromium via Playwright (for Anna's search)

• An MCP-capable LLM client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cowork, …)

⚠️ Legal

library-mcp includes a client for Anna's Archive, which is subject to ongoing legal action. This project hosts and distributes nothing; you are responsible for compliance with copyright law in your jurisdiction. See docs/annas-disclaimer.md. For a fully copyright-clean workflow, use only the Project Gutenberg tools (~70,000 public-domain texts).

Contributing

PRs welcome — see docs/contributing.md. The Anna's DOM parser in packages/library-mcp/src/annas.ts needs occasional updates when Anna's changes its markup; that's the most common maintenance task.

License

MIT