Never Ask Twice

Enterprise Support MemoryAgent on Qwen Cloud

Never Ask Twice is a production-shaped B2B support memory agent that remembers customer context across sessions, retrieves only the memories that matter, forgets stale facts safely, and proves improvement with a live memory ON/OFF evaluation.

The demo agent is Nat — short for Never Ask Twice. Nat remembers what customers already told support: their SLA tier, product configuration, escalation preference, open issues, and promised follow-ups. When the customer returns days later, Nat does not restart from zero.

The result

Re-ask rate: 0.00 with memory
Re-ask rate: 1.00 without memory

The improvement is not asserted in the README. It is produced by the evaluation harness:

pnpm eval

Built for the Qwen Cloud Global AI Hackathon — Track: MemoryAgent.

Related MCP server: BuildAutomata Memory MCP Server

What makes it a MemoryAgent

Never Ask Twice implements explicit memory tiers:

• Working memory — current-session context.

• Episodic memory — raw support events with Qwen embeddings and provenance.

• Semantic memory — distilled customer facts with confidence, validity windows, and source links.

• Forgetting policy — TTL expiry, supersession, stale-memory exclusion, and audit-safe provenance.

• Budgeted recall — relevant memories only, capped to a strict context budget.

• MCP surface — memory tools exposed for agent interoperability.

This is not transcript logging. It is structured memory with retrieval discipline, provenance, forgetting, and measurable cross-session improvement.

Architecture

┌─────────────┐     ┌─────────────┐     ┌─────────────────────────────┐
│  Customer   │────▶│  Hono API   │────▶│  Memory Service             │
│  chat / MCP │     │  on FC      │     │  (working, episodic,        │
└─────────────┘     └─────────────┘     │   semantic, forgetting)     │
                                        └─────────────┬───────────────┘
                                                      │
                              ┌───────────────────────┼───────────────────────┐
                              ▼                       ▼                       ▼
                        ┌───────────┐         ┌───────────┐         ┌───────────┐
                        │ Qwen Cloud │         │ Postgres  │         │  MCP stdio │
                        │ DashScope  │         │ + pgvector │         │  4 tools   │
                        └───────────┘         └───────────┘         └───────────┘

Getting started

1. Clone and install

git clone https://github.com/marcelle-labs/never-ask-twice.git
cd never-ask-twice
pnpm install

2. Configure environment

cp .env.example .env

Edit .env and set your DASHSCOPE_API_KEY from DashScope. The example is pre-filled for local Postgres on port 5433.

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://neverasktwice:neverasktwice@localhost:5433/neverasktwice
DASHSCOPE_API_KEY=your-key-here
QWEN_BASE_URL=https://dashscope-intl.aliyuncs.com/compatible-mode/v1
QWEN_CHAT_MODEL=qwen-plus
QWEN_EMBEDDING_MODEL=text-embedding-v3
QWEN_EMBEDDING_DIM=1024
MEMORY_TOKEN_BUDGET=1200

3. Start Postgres

docker compose up -d

The local database binds to localhost:5433 so it does not collide with other Postgres services on 5432.

4. Run migrations

pnpm migrate

5. Run the eval harness

pnpm eval

Expected output:

memory-on re-ask rate: 0.00
memory-on recall accuracy: 1.00
memory-on hallucination count: 0
memory-off re-ask rate: 1.00
memory-off recall accuracy: 0.00
memory-off hallucination count: 0
re-ask rate: 0.00 (memory) vs 1.00 (no-memory)

6. Run the boundary scan

pnpm boundary-scan

7. Start the local API

pnpm dev

The API will be available at http://localhost:3000 with endpoints:

• GET /health — health check

• POST /turn — append a customer/agent turn

• POST /sessions/:id/close — close a session and distill episodic → semantic memory

• POST /recall — recall a bounded memory bundle

8. Run the MCP server

pnpm build
node dist/src/mcp/server.js

The MCP server exposes four tools: recall_memory, write_memory, distill_session, and forget.

Project structure

• apps/api — Hono API and demo surface

• packages/contracts — Zod schemas and shared types

• packages/db — Drizzle schema and migrations

• packages/memory — memory services and retrieval logic

• packages/eval — eval harness

• packages/mcp — stdio MCP surface

• src — canonical implementation shared by the API and MCP

• eval — frozen three-session scenario, ground truth, and expected output

• scripts — boundary scan, migration, demo script check

Key commands

License

Apache-2.0