日本語版 → engram

engram — Human-like memory for AI agents (MCP server)

Persistent memory shared by Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity (Gemini CLI). The more a memory is used, the easier it is to recall; unused memories sink but never disappear — the same dynamics as human memory.

This is the international edition: all documentation, the setup wizard, CLI messages, and agent-facing instructions are in English, and the default embedding model is intfloat/multilingual-e5-small (100+ languages, ~470 MB download) — so your memories themselves can be written in English or almost any other language. A fully Japanese edition tuned for Japanese (Ruri-v3 embeddings) lives at engram.

Quick start

Option 1: one-line install

Windows (PowerShell):

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ricoaiproject-cmd/engram-global/main/install.ps1 | iex

macOS / Linux:

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ricoaiproject-cmd/engram-global/main/install.sh | sh

This single line installs uv, installs engram, and runs the setup wizard. (macOS: git is required — run xcode-select --install first if you don't have it.)

Option 2: manual install in three commands

Windows (PowerShell):

# 1. Install uv (skip if you already have it)
irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex

# 2. Install engram
uv tool install --python 3.12 git+https://github.com/ricoaiproject-cmd/engram-global.git

# 3. Run the setup wizard
engram setup

macOS / Linux:

# 1. Install uv (skip if you already have it)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# 2. Install engram (force a uv-managed Python — see note below)
UV_PYTHON_PREFERENCE=only-managed uv tool install --python 3.12 git+https://github.com/ricoaiproject-cmd/engram-global.git

# 3. Run the setup wizard
engram setup

Why a uv-managed Python? engram needs a Python whose SQLite supports loadable extensions (for sqlite-vec). uv-managed Python provides this; system / python.org builds on macOS do not, and uv would otherwise prefer them when present — hence UV_PYTHON_PREFERENCE=only-managed (install.sh sets it for you). engram doctor has a check row for this.

The setup wizard automatically:

• creates the config file (~/.engram/config.toml)

• initializes the memory folder

• downloads the embedding model (first run only, ~470 MB)

• registers engram with Claude Code / Codex / Antigravity

• registers the hooks for auto-encoding and proactive recall (Claude Code)

Related MCP server: cell-mem

After installation

Just talk to your agent

Your agent performs every engram operation on its own. You simply have normal conversations, and memories accumulate and get used automatically.

Take the onboarding interview first (recommended)

Ask your agent:

Read ~/.engram/ONBOARDING.md and interview me.

Seeding your working style, preferences, and background makes the memory useful from day one.

Check your environment

engram doctor

Shows Python version, config file, model cache, embedding backend (ONNX / torch), install health (detects leftover ~ngram-style remnants of a failed pip reinstall that break import engram), per-agent registration status as [OK] / [NG] / [--], FTS5 availability (whether SQLite's full-text search extension is loaded, since keyword search silently degrades without it), and a perf summary section that surfaces recent MCP tool-call and startup timings recorded to data_dir/perf/perf_log.jsonl (see below) so a "something feels slow" complaint can be diagnosed from data rather than guesswork.

Re-run setup (e.g. after installing a new agent)

engram setup

Safe to run any number of times (idempotent). Only unregistered agents are added.

Choose which agents to register

Even with multiple agents installed, you can connect engram to just the ones you want.

# Register with Claude Code only
engram setup --agents claude

# Register with both Claude Code and Codex
engram setup --agents claude,codex

Valid names: claude / codex / gemini (antigravity is an alias for gemini). Without --agents, interactive mode lists the detected agents and lets you pick by number (Enter selects all); --non-interactive registers all detected agents as before.

Choosing a different embedding model

The engine is model-agnostic. Set embed_model (and, for prefix-style retrieval models, query_prefix / doc_prefix) in ~/.engram/config.toml, then rebuild the index:

# Example: a small English-only model (no prefixes)
embed_model = "sentence-transformers/all-MiniLM-L6-v2"
query_prefix = ""
doc_prefix = ""

engram reindex       # re-embed all memories with the new model
engram export-onnx   # optional: regenerate the ONNX fast path

Note: the built-in mean pooling matches models such as MiniLM, E5, and Ruri; CLS-pooling models (e.g. bge) are not supported by the ONNX path.

Faster startup with ONNX

Since v0.11, engram setup (which the one-line installer runs for you) exports the model to ONNX automatically, so no manual step is needed — it is skipped when already exported (idempotent). Use the manual command only when you want to re-export, e.g. after switching embedding models:

engram export-onnx

This converts the embedding model to ONNX (no extra dependencies — the already-installed torch does the one-time conversion) and the server starts using it automatically (embed_backend=auto). Startup drops from 12–24 s (torch import) to ~2 s, and no MCP client timeout tuning is needed anymore.

Safety: the export verifies that the ONNX embeddings match the torch path on a set of sample texts (min cosine ≥ 0.999, including a long text that crosses the sliding-window boundary of ModernBERT-based models) and refuses to install a drifted model — a silently drifted embedding space would corrupt recall against your existing index.db.

embed_backend in config.toml (or ENGRAM_EMBED_BACKEND) selects the runtime: auto (default; ONNX if exported, else torch), onnx (forced; errors if not exported), torch (forced fallback).

Startup mode (ENGRAM_PRELOAD)

The default is auto (v0.10.0+): if the ONNX model has been exported, engram picks background (handshake responds immediately); on the torch fallback it picks blocking. No tuning is normally needed, and clients whose MCP startup timeout settings have no effect (seen in the wild: Codex Desktop 26.707) connect out of the box.

If engram fails to connect at startup on the torch fallback, raise the client's MCP startup timeout (for Claude Code: MCP_TIMEOUT=120000) or run engram export-onnx, rather than forcing background — on torch that only converts a visible startup timeout into a 3-minute first recall.

More like real memory (new in v0.3)

Auto-encoding — sessions become memories by themselves

When a Claude Code session ends, a hook summarizes the conversation and saves it as an episode memory (engram setup registers the hook for you). Even if the agent forgets to call remember, "what we did yesterday" is preserved. Disable with auto_encode = false in config.toml.

Proactive recall — memory speaks up on its own

Every time you say something, a hook runs a lightweight search (a fast path that never loads the embedding model) for related memories. The mode is set by surface_mode in config.toml:

The log lives at ~/.engram/surface/surface_log.jsonl. We recommend watching shadow mode for a while and switching to active once the surfaced candidates look right. Use engram surface "some text" to check manually what would surface.

Tuning parameters: surface_threshold (score threshold, default 0.45) / surface_min_relevance (relevance floor, default 0.25 — a gate that keeps even important memories from surfacing when they are unrelated to what you said) / surface_max_items (max items per prompt, default 2).

Memory rooms — separating work and personal contexts

Every memory carries a room label. Map folders to rooms in config.toml and the room is resolved automatically from the working directory:

[room_paths]
'C:/Users/you/work-projects' = 'work'
'C:/Users/you/personal' = 'personal'

• Unmapped folders and pre-existing memories are all common

• recall searches only "current room + common" (room="*" searches across all rooms)

• Auto-encoding and proactive recall respect rooms too, so work memories never leak into personal contexts (and vice versa)

Sharing memories across machines

The Markdown store can live on a synced folder (e.g. a cloud drive) shared by several machines, but index.db is per-machine and local — so a memory written on one machine isn't searchable on another until that machine indexes it. The MCP server checks this at startup via startup_index_check in config.toml: auto (default) reindexes when it detects a markdown/index mismatch, warn logs a notice, off disables it. You can also run engram reindex any time.

How the memory works

Core design

Embeddings (where a memory sits in meaning-space) stay fixed; a separate axis — activation — modulates search ranking. Meaning = where it is, activation = how easily it comes to mind.

The same properties as human memory

• The more you use it, the easier it is to recall — ACT-R activation model; every use by the agent reinforces it automatically

• Unused memories sink but never disappear — power-law decay; deep recall can always reach them through associative links

• Memories from striking contexts are engraved deeply — initial encoding boost by importance + slower decay = flashbulb memory

• Corrected mistakes are engraved deepest of all — the correct tool records the error together with the fix = hypercorrection effect

Memory dynamics in brief

• Activation: B = ln(Σ w_j·(now−t_j)^(−d_i)), normalized to 0..1 with a sigmoid; computed on the fly from the access log

• d_i = clamp(0.5 − 0.2·(imp−5)/5, 0.3, 0.6) — higher importance forgets slower

• create event weight 1 + 2·(imp/10) — critical memories start strong

• merely recalled: weight 0.3 / actually useful (reinforce): weight 1.0×strength

• Memories reinforced together get co_recall links (Hebbian learning), growing an associative network that deep recall's spreading activation can traverse

Search

Vector neighbors (sentence-transformers embeddings) + BM25 full-text search merged with RRF, then re-ranked by 0.6·relevance + 0.25·activation + 0.15·importance.

Hybrid recall: exact tokens no longer sink

Candidate relevance blends the two search paths instead of collapsing FTS hits onto the vector similarity scale: vector hits keep their cosine similarity, and FTS hits get a lexical relevance 1 - exp(bm25) derived directly from BM25 (0 for bm25 >= 0). When an id is hit by both, the higher of the two wins. Rare, decisive lexical matches — memory IDs, file paths, error codes, other exact tokens — push bm25 deep negative and surface lex near 1.0, clearing the narrow band into which dense-retriever cosine similarities tend to compress (with the Japanese model Ruri-v3, for example, 0.8–0.87). Previously, FTS-only hits were assigned the minimum vector similarity among the candidate pool, which buried exact-match results at the bottom of the ranking even when they were the obviously correct answer.

Short queries are covered too (v0.7.1). The FTS5 trigram tokenizer cannot index terms shorter than 3 characters, so 2-character terms (common in CJK text) used to be invisible to lexical search, and mixed queries containing any short token returned zero rows because of the implicit AND. The MATCH expression is now built from tokens of 3+ characters only, and when no such token exists the search falls back to LIKE substring matching with an IDF-based pseudo score (lex = N/(N+df): rarer terms score higher).

Memory types

File layout

~/.engram/
  config.toml        Config file (generated by engram setup)
  index.db           SQLite index (rebuildable from Markdown via reindex)
  MEMORY_PROTOCOL.md Agent operating instructions (imported into each agent's instruction file)
  ONBOARDING.md      Initial interview script
  surface/           Proactive recall log and session state
  hooks.log          Hook activity log
  consolidation_state.json  Candidate-cluster count + last-nudge timestamp (consolidation nudge)
  perf/perf_log.jsonl       Timing log for MCP tool calls and startup (when perf_log = true)

<memories_dir>/      Source of truth: Markdown (opens and edits fine in Obsidian)
  knowledge/
  preferences/
  projects/
  episodes/YYYY/MM/
  _trash/

memories_dir defaults to ~/.engram/memories, but pointing it at a Google Drive or OneDrive synced folder gives you backup and multi-device sharing. The SQLite index always stays local, so there is no sync-conflict risk.

MCP tools

Consolidation (the sleep of the system)

Clusters old episode memories and distills them into knowledge. The server only returns candidates; the summarization is done by the LLM (your agent). Example nightly run:

claude -p "Call engram's consolidation_candidates, summarize each cluster with remember (type=knowledge or project, related_ids=the source episodes), finish with mark_consolidated, then report stats."

Automatic nudge cycle

On top of the cron-style nightly run above, engram nudges the agent to consolidate on its own, without any scheduled job:

1. SessionEnd counts how many consolidation-candidate clusters currently exist (via consolidation_candidates) and stores the count in data_dir/consolidation_state.json.

2. UserPromptSubmit (the same lightweight hook that powers proactive recall) checks that state on the next session and, if enough clusters have piled up and enough time has passed since the last nudge, injects an additionalContext message asking the agent to run consolidation_candidates → remember → mark_consolidated at a natural pause in the conversation. The nudge fires even when surface_mode = "off" — it is independent of proactive recall.

Controlled by three settings (in config.toml or as ENGRAM_* environment variables):

For developers

Setting up to develop in this repository (run at the repo root):

# Virtual env (for development; distribution uses uv tool install)
python -m venv "$env:USERPROFILE\.engram\venv"
& "$env:USERPROFILE\.engram\venv\Scripts\python.exe" -m pip install -e ".[dev]"

Tests and verification

$py = "$env:USERPROFILE\.engram\venv\Scripts\python.exe"

& $py -m pytest                          # all tests
& $py -m pytest tests\test_setup.py -q   # setup logic only
& $py scripts\simulate.py                # simulate access patterns (30 days)
& $py scripts\check_mcp_e2e.py           # MCP end-to-end check

Diagnostics / CLI (for manual checks)

$engram = "$env:USERPROFILE\.engram\venv\Scripts\engram.exe"

& $engram doctor
& $engram remember "content" --type knowledge --importance 7
& $engram recall "query" --deep
& $engram surface "utterance text"
& $engram stats

Project structure

src/engram/
  config.py        Settings (defaults < config.toml < env vars) + room resolution
  engine.py        The memory engine
  store.py         Markdown source-of-truth store
  db.py            SQLite index (sqlite-vec + FTS5)
  dynamics.py      ACT-R activation model
  embedder.py      RuriEmbedder / FakeEmbedder
  server.py        MCP server (stdio)
  cli.py           CLI entry point
  setup.py         Setup wizard & doctor & hook registration
  hooks.py         Hook entry points (auto-encoding / proactive recall)
  transcript.py    Deterministic transcript summarization (auto-encoding)
  surface.py       Lightweight search path for proactive recall (no model)
  templates/       MEMORY_PROTOCOL.md / ONBOARDING.md
tests/
  test_setup.py    Setup pure-logic tests
  test_config.py   Settings precedence tests
  test_store.py    Markdown store tests
  test_db.py       DB operation tests
  test_engine.py   Engine tests
  test_room.py     Memory room tests
  test_surface.py  Proactive recall tests
  test_transcript.py  Transcript summarization tests
  test_hooks.py    Hook and hook-registration tests
  test_integration.py  Integration tests

Troubleshooting

Codex says engram is enabled but the connection times out on startup

On the torch fallback path, engram loads the embedding model (plus checks the memories folder) on every startup, which can take longer than Codex's default 30-second MCP startup timeout — especially right after a reboot, during antivirus scans, or when the memories folder lives on a cloud-synced drive (Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.). Your memories are fine; only the initial connection is timing out. (Running engram export-onnx once largely eliminates this — startup drops to ~2 s.)

Newer versions of engram setup write a longer startup timeout automatically. If you registered with an older version, either re-run engram setup --agents codex, or add one line to the engram block in ~/.codex/config.toml yourself:

[mcp_servers.engram]
command = "..."                # leave as is
startup_timeout_sec = 120.0    # add this line

Then fully restart Codex (quit and relaunch, not just close the window).

Update

Re-run the same one-line installer to overwrite with the latest version:

irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ricoaiproject-cmd/engram-global/main/install.ps1 | iex

macOS / Linux:

curl -LsSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ricoaiproject-cmd/engram-global/main/install.sh | sh

uv tool upgrade engram does the same (package update only).

• The one-line installer also re-runs setup afterwards, so environments that never exported the ONNX model get converted automatically and startup drops to ~2 s (skipped when already exported)

• Your memories and config (~/.engram and the memories folder) are kept — nothing is deleted

• After updating, restart each agent that uses engram (Claude Code, etc.) so the MCP server reconnects

Uninstall

# 1. Remove the registration from each agent
claude mcp remove engram

# 1b. Manually remove the engram entries from hooks in ~/.claude/settings.json
#     (the "engram hook ..." commands under SessionEnd / UserPromptSubmit)
# 2. Manually remove the engram block from ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
# 3. Manually remove the [mcp_servers.engram] block from ~/.codex/config.toml
# 4. Manually remove the engram entry from ~/.gemini/config/mcp_config.json

# 5. Uninstall engram itself
uv tool uninstall engram

# 6. To delete the data as well (memories, config, model cache)
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force "$env:USERPROFILE\.engram"
Remove-Item -Recurse -Force "$env:USERPROFILE\.cache\huggingface\hub\models--intfloat--multilingual-e5-small*"

On macOS / Linux, steps 5–6 are:

uv tool uninstall engram
rm -rf ~/.engram
rm -rf ~/.cache/huggingface/hub/models--intfloat--multilingual-e5-small*