Tacitus

Long-term memory for your AI agents — local-first, with provenance.

Tacitus is an MCP server that turns any folder of Markdown notes into an agent-native knowledge base. It gives AI agents (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, and any MCP client) three things they actually need:

1. Memory with provenance — typed, queryable long-term memory. Every fact carries its source and is returned within a token budget; contradictions are surfaced, not silently resolved.

2. Retrieval that fits the context window — search returns ranked snippets (never whole notes) under a token budget; get_note discloses progressively (outline → frontmatter → full); the wikilink graph is a queryable API. Hybrid lexical + semantic search, with an optional neural embedder.

3. Safe write-back — propose a changeset, preview the diff, commit atomically, and revert by version. Read-only scope forbids mutations; every write is audited.

Notes stay as plain .md files in your folder. No cloud, no lock-in.

Recorded from a real session — the memory id, changeset id, version id and audit line above are what the binary actually returned (how).

Quick start

npx -y @dashiro/tacitus-mcp-server /path/to/your/vault

Claude Code

claude mcp add tacitus -- npx -y @dashiro/tacitus-mcp-server /path/to/your/vault

Claude Desktop (claude_desktop_config.json)

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tacitus": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "@dashiro/tacitus-mcp-server", "/path/to/your/vault"]
    }
  }
}

Native binary (no Node)

Prefer a single, zero-dependency binary? The Rust server ships prebuilt for macOS, Linux, and Windows on every release.

# macOS / Linux — installs `tacitus-mcp` into your Cargo bin dir
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
  https://github.com/ionasrobert/tacitus-mcp-server/releases/latest/download/tacitus-mcp-installer.sh | sh

# Windows (PowerShell)
irm https://github.com/ionasrobert/tacitus-mcp-server/releases/latest/download/tacitus-mcp-installer.ps1 | iex

Or grab a .tar.xz / .zip for your platform from the latest release. Then point any MCP client at the binary instead of npx:

claude mcp add tacitus -- tacitus-mcp /path/to/your/vault

The native binary is the flagship server (25 tools; the npm server has the core 16 — see the table below). Both share the same on-disk formats, so a vault works with either. Set TACITUS_SCOPE=read-only to run the native server without write permissions.

Related MCP server: 50 First Tapes MCP Server

Tools

* Native-Rust-server first (the npm server will catch up): properties_query — Bases-like structured queries over YAML frontmatter (filters eq|ne|contains|exists|not_exists|gt|lt|gte|lte, sort, select, token_budget). Templates — Markdown files in .tacitus/templates/ whose {{var}} placeholders form a schema; substitution happens before YAML parsing so numeric vars stay typed, {{date}}/{{time}}/{{datetime}} auto-fill, and creation is versioned + audited like any agent write. Tasks — every checklist line (- [ ]) as a typed entity (done, due from due:YYYY-MM-DD or 📅, #tags), queryable and toggleable; toggling takes the task text as a concurrency guard so a stale caller gets a CONFLICT instead of flipping the wrong task. rename_note retargets every wikilink that resolves to the note (alias/heading kept) in one atomic changeset — a single revert undoes the whole rename; delete_note is versioned too.

Every tool validates input with a schema and returns structured, actionable errors ({ code, reason, suggestion }) rather than stack traces.

For developers: plugins & integrations

In Tacitus, a plugin is an MCP client — the tool contract above is the public API, with permission scoping, versioning, and audit built in.

• docs/PLUGINS.md — integration guide: connect an agent, write a plugin in Python/TypeScript, embed the Rust engine, plugin patterns

• TypeScript SDK — @dashiro/tacitus-sdk: every tool as a typed method, {code, reason, suggestion} errors thrown as TacitusToolError:

  const tacitus = await TacitusClient.spawn({ vault: '/path/to/vault' });
  const hits = await tacitus.search({ query: 'client X', token_budget: 500 });

• Sandboxed WASM plugins (experimental) — crate tacitus-plugins runs guest wasm under Wasmtime with manifest-declared permissions (tool allowlist

  • scope), fuel and memory limits, no WASI: tacitus.call is tools/call. The native binary embeds the runtime: tacitus-mcp plugin list|run for cron agents and scripts. See docs/PLUGINS.md §5

• docs/MCP_API.md — full reference for all 25 tools (params, returns, error codes)

• Neural search (opt-in): TACITUS_EMBEDDER=ollama uses a local Ollama daemon for embeddings (TACITUS_OLLAMA_EMBED_MODEL, default nomic-embed-text; needs an Ollama with embedding support). Vectors cached in .tacitus/vectors/; falls back to the deterministic hashing embedder when unavailable.

• docs/SYNC.md — Sync (beta): E2E-encrypted CRDT sync between devices (tacitus-mcp sync init; sync status shows how much of the relay quota a vault uses)

• docs/DATA_FORMAT.md — the on-disk format (.tacitus/ internals, stable ids, note conventions)

• examples/ — three complete plugins (Python read-only analyzer, Node daily-note cron agent, sandboxed WASM guest), tested against the binary

What the sync relay can see

Left: two devices, plain Markdown. Right: everything the relay stores for that vault. Those blobs were read out of a real log.jsonl after the recording — no note title, no path, no plaintext. The vault code is the key and never leaves your devices; lose it and the relay's copy is undecryptable forever.

Semantic search (optional neural embeddings)

search defaults to hybrid mode (lexical + a deterministic, offline embedder that catches morphological variants). For synonym/paraphrase matching, opt into a neural embedder:

npm i @huggingface/transformers
TACITUS_EMBEDDER=transformers npx @dashiro/tacitus-mcp-server /path/to/vault

Vectors are cached under .tacitus/vectors/. Falls back to the deterministic embedder if the optional dependency or model isn't available.

How it stores things

your-vault/
├── notes...             ← your Markdown files (untouched format)
└── .tacitus/
    ├── memory/*.md      ← agent memories (Markdown + YAML frontmatter)
    ├── vectors/*.json   ← cached embeddings
    ├── history/*.json   ← version snapshots (for revert)
    └── audit.log        ← JSONL log of every agent write

Development

Polyglot monorepo. The reference server (shipped on npm) is TypeScript in packages/mcp-server. A native Rust server in crates/ provides a single-binary, zero-runtime-deps build (crates/tacitus-core engine + crates/tacitus-mcp rmcp server) — a superset of the TS server (25 vs 16 tools). Its stable_id matches the TS engine byte-for-byte, so memory ids are identical across both engines.

# TypeScript server
npm ci
npm test          # vitest
npm run typecheck
npm run lint
npm run build     # tsup → packages/mcp-server/dist
npm run eval      # retrieval quality report

# Rust server (native, single binary)
cargo test
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --check
cargo run -p tacitus-mcp -- /path/to/vault   # runs the MCP server on stdio
cargo build --release                         # → target/release/tacitus-mcp

Cross-platform release binaries are built and published to GitHub Releases by cargo-dist (dist-workspace.toml + .github/workflows/release.yml) on every v* tag.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.