Engram

The LLM is stateless. Engram isn't.

Engram is a persistent developer-memory MCP server. It gives Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Continue, and any other Model Context Protocol client a long-term memory backed by Postgres + pgvector (Supabase by default). Nine MCP tools — memory_remember, memory_recall, memory_search, memory_forget, memory_status, memory_summarize_session, plus the three-layer progressive-disclosure set memory_index / memory_timeline / memory_get — let your assistant store decisions, recall them across sessions, and surface the right context when you start a new conversation. An optional HTTP webhook server (engram serve) exposes the same operations to non-MCP clients.

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Why Engram exists

Every new chat with an LLM starts from zero. You explain the project, the conventions, the bug you fixed last Tuesday, the reason you picked Postgres over DynamoDB — and tomorrow you do it all again. Codebases have CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md / cursor rules, but those are static. They don't grow as you work.

Engram is the writable side of that. As your assistant works it stores discrete facts, decisions, and bug fixes into a vector database with embeddings and metadata. On the next session it can recall the relevant slice — scoped to the project you're in, ranked by importance and recency, deduplicated, and trimmed to a token budget.

It is deliberately small. Six MCP tools, one schema, one SQL function. No agent framework, no orchestration layer, no proprietary cloud. If you can run Postgres with pgvector, you can run Engram.

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Install

npm install -g @jhizzard/engram

Or pin it as a project dev dependency:

npm install --save-dev @jhizzard/engram

You will also need:

• A Postgres database with the vector and pg_trgm extensions (Supabase ships with both)
• An OPENAI_API_KEY for embedding generation (text-embedding-3-large, 1536 dimensions)
• An ANTHROPIC_API_KEY if you want memory_summarize_session and the consolidation job (uses Haiku)

Apply the migrations

The migrations/ directory contains three SQL files. Apply them in order against your database:

psql "$DATABASE_URL" -f node_modules/@jhizzard/engram/migrations/001_engram_tables.sql
psql "$DATABASE_URL" -f node_modules/@jhizzard/engram/migrations/002_engram_search_function.sql
psql "$DATABASE_URL" -f node_modules/@jhizzard/engram/migrations/003_engram_event_webhook.sql

If you're using Supabase, paste each file into the SQL editor and run them in order.

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MCP setup

All of the configurations below assume the engram binary is on your PATH (because you ran npm install -g). If you'd rather run it from a checkout, replace "command": "engram" with "command": "node" and add "args": ["/absolute/path/to/dist/mcp-server/index.js"].

Claude Code

Edit ~/.claude/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "engram": {
      "command": "engram",
      "env": {
        "SUPABASE_URL": "https://YOUR-PROJECT.supabase.co",
        "SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY": "YOUR-SERVICE-ROLE-KEY",
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-...",
        "ANTHROPIC_API_KEY": "sk-ant-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Code. The six memory_* tools should appear in the MCP tools list.

Cursor

Edit ~/.cursor/mcp.json (Cursor uses the same MCP config shape):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "engram": {
      "command": "engram",
      "env": {
        "SUPABASE_URL": "https://YOUR-PROJECT.supabase.co",
        "SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY": "YOUR-SERVICE-ROLE-KEY",
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Windsurf

Edit ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "engram": {
      "command": "engram",
      "env": {
        "SUPABASE_URL": "https://YOUR-PROJECT.supabase.co",
        "SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY": "YOUR-SERVICE-ROLE-KEY",
        "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..."
      }
    }
  }
}

Generic stdio MCP (Cline, Continue, anything else)

Engram speaks the standard stdio MCP transport. Any client that lets you point at a binary will work:

{
  "command": "engram",
  "args": [],
  "env": {
    "SUPABASE_URL": "https://YOUR-PROJECT.supabase.co",
    "SUPABASE_SERVICE_ROLE_KEY": "YOUR-SERVICE-ROLE-KEY",
    "OPENAI_API_KEY": "sk-..."
  }
}

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Tool reference

Tool	Purpose
memory_remember	Store a fact, decision, or preference. Embeds, dedups (cosine > 0.88 → update in place, > 0.95 → skip), inserts.
memory_recall	Smart retrieval. Hybrid search (full-text + semantic + recency + project affinity), dedup, smart re-rank, token-budget trim. Always returns at least min_results if available.
memory_search	Low-level filtered search. Returns raw scored hits. Use this for admin tooling or debugging recall.
memory_forget	Soft-delete a memory by UUID. The row is archived, not destroyed.
memory_status	Stats: total active memories, sessions processed, breakdown by project / source_type / category.
memory_summarize_session	Pass in a session transcript or document; Engram extracts discrete facts via Haiku and stores each as a memory.
memory_index	Three-layer search step 1. Compact {id, snippet≤120, source_type, project, created_at} hits (~80–120 tokens each). Drill into IDs with memory_get, or surround with memory_timeline.
memory_timeline	Three-layer search step 2. Memories from the same project chronologically surrounding either a query hit or a specific observation ID. Windows: 1h / 24h / 7d.
memory_get	Three-layer search step 3. Batch-fetch full rows by UUID (1–100 IDs). Batch-only to discourage N+1 calls.

Three-layer progressive disclosure

The memory_index → memory_timeline → memory_get trio is designed for token-efficient retrieval. Start with memory_index to get a cheap overview, use memory_timeline when you need temporal context around a hit, and only call memory_get once you know which full rows you actually want. This matches the search / timeline / get_observations shape from claude-mem.

HTTP webhook server (non-MCP clients)

Run engram serve to start a tiny HTTP surface on ENGRAM_WEBHOOK_PORT (default 37778). It exposes the same operations as the MCP tools over JSON:

• POST /engram with body { "op": "remember" | "recall" | "search" | "status" | "index" | "timeline" | "get", ...args }.
• GET /healthz — returns { ok, version, store: { rows, last_write } }.
• GET /observation/:id — single memory by UUID (the citation endpoint). Same shape as a memory_get row.

The MCP stdio server is unaffected — engram with no subcommand still starts it.

CLI subcommands

Command	What it does
engram	Start the stdio MCP server (default — backwards compatible).
engram serve	Start the HTTP webhook server on $ENGRAM_WEBHOOK_PORT (default 37778).
engram export --project <name> --since <iso>	Stream every matching memory as JSONL on stdout. Paginated, never loads the full store into memory. Include embeddings so re-imports don't re-embed.
engram import	Read JSONL from stdin. Skips rows whose id already exists, embeds rows that are missing an embedding, preserves id/created_at/updated_at/is_active/archived/superseded_by when present.

Export/import is the migration path out of (or into) Engram:

engram export --project termdeck > termdeck-backup.jsonl
engram import < termdeck-backup.jsonl

Configuring memory_hybrid_search

Starting in 0.2.0, memory_hybrid_search caps match_count at 200 by default so a single call cannot pull tens of thousands of rows. Override per-database or per-session:

ALTER DATABASE your_db SET engram.max_match_count = 500;
SET engram.max_match_count = 500;

memory_hybrid_search_explain(...) is a sibling function that returns EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS) output for the equivalent call. Use it when diagnosing slow recall on very large stores.

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Source types

Every memory has a source_type. The six values you can pass to memory_remember are:

Value	When to use it
decision	Architectural or strategic choices ("we picked Postgres because…"). Decays slowly (one-year half-life), highest weight in ranking.
fact	Project facts ("the API base URL is X"). 90-day half-life.
preference	User or team preferences ("the team prefers Tailwind over CSS modules"). One-year half-life.
bug_fix	A specific bug and its resolution. 30-day half-life — stale fixes age out.
architecture	System architecture notes. One-year half-life, second-highest weight.
code_context	Snippet-level context about a specific file or function. 14-day half-life.

Internal source types like session_summary and document_chunk exist in the SQL ranking function but are not exposed via the MCP memory_remember tool — they're populated by memory_summarize_session and external ingestion pipelines.

See docs/SOURCE-TYPES.md for the full decay and weighting profile.

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Schema overview

Three tables and one search function:

• memory_items — the main store. id, content, embedding vector(1536), source_type, category, project, metadata jsonb, is_active, archived, superseded_by, created_at, updated_at. Indexed with HNSW on the embedding column and a GIN trigram index on content.
• memory_sessions — optional session metadata for the memory_summarize_session workflow.
• memory_relationships — typed relationships between memories: supersedes, relates_to, contradicts, elaborates, caused_by.
• memory_hybrid_search() — RRF fusion of full-text + semantic search, with tiered recency decay, source_type weighting, and project affinity scoring all in one SQL function.

Full DDL is in migrations/001_engram_tables.sql and migrations/002_engram_search_function.sql. Schema documentation is at docs/SCHEMA.md.

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Pairs with TermDeck

TermDeck is a browser-based terminal multiplexer with rich metadata overlays and per-terminal AI agent detection. Wire Engram into TermDeck and every terminal session can write its events into shared memory; the "Ask about this terminal" input then becomes a recall query against the same store. See docs/INTEGRATION.md for the integration recipe.

Pairs with Rumen

Rumen is an async learning layer that runs on top of any pgvector memory store, including Engram. Rumen wakes on a schedule, reads recent session activity, cross-references it with everything you've ever stored, and writes the connections back as rumen_insights rows. Engram is the memory; Rumen is the part of the stomach that keeps chewing after you stop working.

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License

MIT. See LICENSE.