Verified project record

MemPalace/mempalace

mempalace/mempalace is a local-first AI memory application that stores conversation history verbatim, preventing context loss during AI coding sessions. It provides scoped semantic search, pluggable storage backends, and 36 MCP server tools for integration with compatible coding environments.

Project overview

Project type: MCP · AI Agent · RAG
Use cases: Knowledge Q&A · Coding & Development
Deployment: Refer to project documentation
License: MIT

Best for

Developers and AI engineers who require a local-only data boundary and operate within compatible CLI and API interaction modes.

Key capabilities

Stores conversation history and content as verbatim text without summarization.
Provides scoped searches across structured memory wings, rooms, and drawers to retrieve verbatim text context.
Allows swapping the retrieval backend (such as ChromaDB or Milvus) via an interface contract.
Exposes 36 MCP tools for palace reads/writes, graph operations, cross-wing navigation, drawer management, and agent diaries.
Provides a local SQLite-backed entity-relationship graph with validity windows.
Integrates hooks for Claude Code, Codex CLI, and Cursor IDE to save sessions periodically.

Limitations and risks

LLM rerank requires an external capable model to achieve the highest retrieval accuracy.

Getting started

Install the application easily using a uv tool or pipx with a single command, initialize a target project directory, and execute a mining command to begin capturing sessions.
Ensure the system has approximately 300 MB of disk space for the local embedding model (embeddinggemma-300m or all-MiniLM-L6-v2). A GPU is optional.

Evidence and sources

GitHub project description: The best-benchmarked open-source AI memory system. And it's free.
README: Claude Code sessions expire in 30 days without auto-save hooks wired.
README: MemPalace stores your conversation history as verbatim text and retrieves it with semantic search. It does not summarize, extract, or paraphrase.
README: ChromaDB is the default and needs no configuration. MemPalace also ships a pluggable backend contract
README: 36 MCP tools cover palace reads/writes, knowledge-graph operations, cross-wing navigation, drawer management, and agent diaries.

Reviewed at: 2026-07-17T06:39:38Z