v0.12.1 — Upgrade-Experience Patches (setup-vectors, doctor EmbeddingsCheck, plugin manifest fix)

Theme: Upgrade-experience patches surfaced by the 0.12.0 soak. Four small but high-impact fixes — all uncovered by one user upgrading a single project — closing visibility gaps in the doctor and the plugin manifest. No schema changes, no breaking changes.

Added

• claude-memory setup-vectors command — the documented opt-in path for end users who want vector recall via the BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 model. fastembed remains a dev/test gem dependency by design (the default install stays light); this command verifies the chosen provider is loadable (gracefully prompts to gem install fastembed if not), writes CLAUDE_MEMORY_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER (and optional CLAUDE_MEMORY_EMBEDDING_MODEL) to the project's .claude/settings.json env block — the same mechanism Claude Code uses for OTel — and re-indexes existing facts via the existing IndexCommand (skip with --no-reindex). Supports --status for current config and --dry-run for inspection. Preserves unrelated settings.json keys.
• Checks::EmbeddingsCheck in claude-memory doctor — surfaces the active embedding provider name and dimensions, hints to set CLAUDE_MEMORY_EMBEDDING_PROVIDER=fastembed when on tfidf default and fastembed is loadable, and reports dimension mismatches between stored vectors and the current provider. Closes the visibility gap where a user could see sqlite-vec available ✓ while silently running on tfidf without knowing.

Fixed

• plugin.json declared skills: "./skills/" and outputStyles: "./output-styles/" pointing at non-existent directories. Per Claude Code's plugin reference, distill-transcripts.md is correctly a flat command (not a skill); both forms register as /<name> slash commands. Dead keys removed. Plugin spec rewritten as deletion-safe ("every directory key in plugin.json points at an existing directory") so this can't regress.

Documentation

• README "Upgrading" section now documents the marketplace-refresh + /reload-plugins flow explicitly. After /plugin marketplace update <name> users must run /reload-plugins or restart Claude Code for new slash commands to appear — this bit one user upgrading to 0.12.0 looking for /distill-transcripts. Includes /audit-memory and /distill-transcripts as named examples.

Upgrade Notes

• No DB migrations. Schema stays at v18.
• After gem update claude_memory, run /plugin marketplace update claude-memory && /reload-plugins (or restart Claude Code) to see the new /distill-transcripts and /audit-memory slash commands.
• Existing fact bases continue to use whatever embedding provider they were indexed under. To opt into fastembed, run claude-memory setup-vectors — it handles provider switching + re-index in one step.
• claude-memory doctor will now emit a warning on tfidf default with fastembed loadable. This is informational, not an error; the system continues to function on tfidf.

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🧪 Real Eval Validation

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Estimated Cost: ~$0.12

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