Mneme — a knowledge graph of "dots" distilled from AI coding sessions

Every AI coding session produces reasoning that dies with the session: a motivation, a guess, the method tried, the result, and what's still open. Mneme keeps that structure. It distills sessions into atomic, linked dots — plain markdown notes — and gives you a browser to grow, link, and roadmap them.

This repo is the reproducible pipeline, not anyone's notes:

viewer/            zero-build web viewer (Cytoscape) + stdlib server
examples/          synthetic demo dots so the viewer renders on a fresh clone
docs/              design spec + prior art (org-roam, Zettelkasten, Cytoscape)
dots/              YOUR notes — gitignored, never committed (see below)

The distill step (session → dots) is an AI-agent skill kept in your own agent config (~/.claude/skills/distill-session), not bundled here — so nobody ships their notes or setup with the tool.

Privacy. Your real dots live in dots/ and are gitignored. This repo only ever tracks the tooling and the synthetic examples/. Keep your dots/ local (and sync them yourself, e.g. Syncthing / a private repo).

Quick start

git clone <this-repo> Mneme && cd Mneme
python3 viewer/serve.py            # -> http://127.0.0.1:8899  (shows examples/)

No build step, no pip install — serve.py is Python-3 stdlib only. When dots/ is empty it renders examples/; once you add real dots they take over.

Remote box without X forwarding:

python3 viewer/serve.py            # on the remote
ssh -L 8899:127.0.0.1:8899 <host>  # on your laptop, then open localhost:8899

Make dots

• With an AI agent: give it the distill-session skill (a small prompt that reads a session and emits dots in the schema below), then ask it to "distill this session into the Mneme". The skill lives in your agent config, not here.
• By hand: create a dots/<id>.md following the schema below.
• In the viewer: the + dot button.

The dot format

YAML frontmatter + fixed body headers + typed wikilinks — portable, git-friendly, Obsidian/Foam/Logseq-compatible. Markdown is the source of truth; INDEX.md is regenerable (python3 viewer/serve.py --reindex). Full schema in docs/.

---
id: 20240112-retry-with-backoff
title: Exponential backoff on the flaky test client
type: method          # insight | method | result | question | milestone | project
project: demo
date: 2024-01-12
status: done          # open | done | parked
milestone: false
keywords: [retry, backoff, jitter]
---
## Motivation
## Guess -> Method -> Result
- Guess: … / Method: … / Result: …
## On-going
- [ ] …
## Links
- next:: [[20240115-ci-green-1000-runs]]
- motivates:: [[20240110-flaky-ci-timeouts]]

Viewer

graph view = force-directed link graph (color = project, shape = type, ★ = milestone). roadmap view = dots on a date axis with next:: arrows. Click a node to edit; save writes back to the markdown file and reindexes.

Prior art

Design borrows org-roam (plain files are the source of truth, any index is a rebuildable cache), the Zettelkasten atomic-note method, the Obsidian/Foam markdown+wikilink format, Breadcrumbs-style typed edges for roadmaps, and Cytoscape.js for a single-file no-build graph. See docs/.

License

MIT for the tooling. viewer/cytoscape.min.js is vendored (MIT, © the Cytoscape Consortium).