memory_recall
Search stored memories to recall prior decisions, conventions, and bug fixes from past sessions. Retrieve relevant knowledge with fuzzy matching and ranking.
Instructions
Search Cortex memories for durable knowledge relevant to a query.
Use this when you need to recall prior decisions, conventions, bug fixes, user preferences, or lessons learned from past Claude Code sessions. It searches the full Obsidian-backed memory store via SQLite FTS5, ranks results with a multi-signal scorer (relevance + recency + usage + importance), and expands related-memory links.
Behaviour:
Read-only. Does not modify any memory, index, or sidecar file. Only side effect is a bump to the access-count telemetry sidecar (~/.cortex/telemetry.json), which influences future ranking.
No authentication required. Cortex is local-first; there are no credentials, tokens, or API keys.
No rate limits. Typical latency is under 100ms on corpora up to ~10k memories; pathological queries can take up to ~500ms.
Data access scope: reads from ~/obsidian-brain/cortex/memories/ and ~/.cortex/search.db. Nothing leaves the local machine.
Idempotent: calling twice with the same query returns the same results (modulo the access-count telemetry bump).
Failure modes: returns "No memories found for: " on empty result sets. Never raises to the caller; internal errors fall back to a slower file-scan path.
Use memory_recall when:
You need specific facts ("what auth library did we pick?")
You want to check if a topic has prior context before making a decision
You're debugging and want to find if this bug was fixed before
Do NOT use for:
Session-level what-I-did-today logs (use
transcript_searchinstead)On-demand query-tailored briefings (use
context_assembleinstead)Listing every memory (use
memory_listinstead)
Returns: Markdown-formatted memory entries, grouped under a "### Memories" header. Each entry has the memory title and body excerpt. If no matches are found, returns "No memories found for: ".
Example: memory_recall(query="jwt auth algorithm", limit=5) → returns the top 5 memories mentioning JWT auth, such as a memory documenting the decision to use RS256 in production.
Input Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| limit | No | Maximum number of top-ranked memories to return. Results are ranked by 50% FTS relevance + 15% recency + 15% access history + 20% importance. Linked memories may be expanded beyond this limit. | |
| query | Yes | Natural-language query describing what you want to find. Can be a question ("how did we handle auth?"), a topic ("jwt rotation"), or a fragment of a decision you vaguely remember. Keyword match is fuzzy (FTS5 + synonym expansion) so approximate terms work. | |
| scope_id | No | Project scope to search within. Defaults to "default" which searches across all projects. Pass a specific project name to narrow the search to that project's memories only. | default |
Output Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| result | Yes |