dfrancislyondflabc-tech/agentic-recall

**Long-term memory for agentic tasks. It tells you when it doesn't know.**
An MCP server that gives Claude Desktop and Claude Code a persistent memory across
sessions — and, unlike a plain vector store, an explicit answer when the corpus does
not contain what you asked for.
That is the whole install. MEMORY_DIR is the one path you supply, and that is deliberate:
the server does **not** go looking through your disk for your notes.
> **🟥 Note the @2 — pin the major version.** npx -y agentic-recall with no version asks npm for
> whatever is tagged latest **every time its cache is cold**, so a new major arrives silently and
> a config that worked yesterday breaks today. That is not hypothetical: 2.0.0 moved five actions to
> a second tool, and a tester's in-flight session started failing with
> received 'index' at action mid-task — because npx had re-resolved latest underneath a running
> workflow. The cache is what makes an unpinned spec *feel* stable, and a cache is not a pin: it is
> cleared by npm cache verify, by disk cleanup, and by every new machine.
>
> @2 takes fixes and features, never a breaking major. agentic-recall@2.0.0 pins exactly.
>
> **🟥 A warm npx cache does NOT pick up a fix on its own.** Measured 2026-09-22: 2.0.3 had been on the
> registry for over an hour, and three servers spawned with npx -y agentic-recall@2 still ran the cached
> 2.0.1. To take a fix, clear the cached copy and re-resolve once — macOS/Linux:
> rm -rf ~/.npm/_npx && npx -y agentic-recall@2 --version; Windows: the Remove-Item line below —
> then restart your client. serverVersion in every response tells you which version actually answered.
> **🟥 Windows users: use this config instead.** Bare npx does not work for a Node MCP client
> on Windows. This is measured, not inferred — CI spawns the published package on windows-latest
> every push, and reports bare npx -> FAILED: spawn npx ENOENT while cmd /c npx connects:
>
>
>
> On Windows npx is a
> batch shim (npx.cmd), and Node's spawn will not resolve it without shell: true. A
> Node-based MCP client using the config above gets spawn EINVAL and the server **silently never
> connects** — it appears configured and does nothing. This is the standard Windows MCP gotcha, not
> specific to this server (claude-code#58510).
> npm i -g is **not** an escape — that installs a .cmd shim too. The only shim-free form is
> pointing node at the file directly:
> "command": "node", "args": ["C:/Users/ /AppData/Roaming/npm/node_modules/agentic-recall/index.js"].
>
> Whether Claude Desktop itself is affected is still unconfirmed — it may spawn through a shell.
> The cmd /c form works either way, so it is the one to use on Windows.
> **🟥 Windows: if npx fails with ECOMPROMISED / Lock compromised, clear the npx cache.**
> Node 24/25 with npm 11 leaves a stale lock in npx's cache directory that it then refuses to
> refresh (npm/cli#8710). Nothing to do with this server
> — it hits MCP Inspector and Gemini CLI identically. **Measured on a real Windows machine: it
> reproduced twice, and clearing the cache fixed it** (then a 98 s first download):
>
>
>
> If it still fails, two alternatives that avoid npx entirely — both verified end to end:
> npm install -g agentic-recall (then "command": "agentic-recall", "args": []), or Node 22,
> where npx works normally.
Requires **Node 20 or newer**. Nothing else — the embedding model downloads on first index
and then runs locally. Your memories never leave the machine.
Prefer to read the code first, or run the suite?
Built by Daniel Francis-Lyon — questions, bug reports and criticism all welcome, either as an
issue on this repo or at **danfrancislyon@gmail.com**.
Privacy Policy
Nothing leaves your machine. Memories are plain files in a folder you choose; the embedding model
runs locally after a one-time download; there is no telemetry, no analytics and no phone-home. The
author receives no data from your installation and has no means of doing so.
Full text: **PRIVACY.md**.
The part most memory tools skip
Retrieval always returns *something*. Ranked by similarity, the least-bad match comes back
looking like an answer, and an agent acting on it cannot tell the difference between "here is
what you wrote" and "here is the closest thing to it".
This server separates those two cases and says which one you got:
Nothing was invented, nothing was silently ranked into first place, and the nearest thing is
offered as a candidate rather than as an answer. Everything below is about how that verdict is
reached and how it is measured.
The same refusal, applied to engineering claims
A memory saying *"I fixed that in abc123"* is a sentence. Classifying sentences has failed here