loci 🧠

Two thousand years ago, orators stored their speeches in the rooms of a palace and walked through them to remember. loci does the same for your files.

Loci is the method behind every memory palace: place knowledge in locations, recall it by walking the path.

A queryable "second brain" for the project docs, notes, and chat logs scattered across a dozen directories — and an MCP server so your AI agents can use it too.

Local files → heading-aware chunking → embeddings → hybrid retrieval (vector + BM25) → LLM answer with section-level citations. The index lives entirely on your machine; only embedding/chat calls go out, to any OpenAI-compatible API (Zhipu / DeepSeek / Kimi / OpenAI / …).

The thesis (from studying the 90k-star platforms and the graveyard of dead lightweight tools — see our competitive landscape study): don't build another chat app. Build the memory layer that every chat app can mount. Claude Desktop, Cursor, Cline, or any MCP host becomes this project's UI, for free.

Demo

Real session, indexed against the docs of minimax-h3-turing (paths shortened for display):

$ python main.py search "what the 22G card can and cannot do" -k 3

[1] minimax-h3-turing/docs/en/01-hardware-limits.md > 01 · What a 2080Ti 22G Can and Cannot Do    (similarity 0.562)
[2] minimax-h3-turing/docs/en/02-w4a8-vs-w4a4.md > 02 · Quantization Measured > You Can Try Without 22G  (similarity 0.446)
[3] minimax-h3-turing/docs/en/01-hardware-limits.md > ... > 3. VRAM is just barely enough — manage it  (similarity 0.504)

$ python main.py ask "How should I choose between T8 aggressive mode and the final-render mode, and why?"

Answer:
* Drafts / preview / shot selection: use T8 aggressive mode — a 43% speedup
  (2.7 min/clip), and "a different picture of equal quality" is fine for picking shots.
* Final shots: use final-render mode (no T8). T8 makes the numerical trajectory
  fork, so re-running with the same seed produces a different clip — which breaks
  the reproducibility final outputs need.

[source: docs/en/08-t8-blockcache-4step.md > Practical Advice (4-step Turbo route)]
[source: docs/en/06-faq.md > 12. Cache-style accelerators break "same-seed re-runs"]

Hybrid retrieval means a Chinese query still finds the English doc (and vice versa) — keyword evidence (BM25) catches what embeddings miss, and every citation points at a section, not just a file.

Does hybrid actually help? (mini-eval, 10 bilingual queries)

$ python scripts/eval_retrieval.py scripts/eval_cases.example.jsonl
vector-only: 9/10  →  hybrid: 10/10

Hybrid also fixed the #1 ranking on keyword-ish queries (e.g. "T8 block cache threshold speedup": vector put an FAQ first, hybrid puts the actual T8 writeup first). Run it against your own corpus with your own cases file.

Reranking: two providers

--rerank reorders the fused candidates for precision:

python main.py search "T8 speedup" --rerank          # provider from config
python main.py search "T8 speedup" --rerank local    # cross-encoder (BAAI/bge-reranker-base)

The local model downloads on first use (~1.1 GB; set HF_ENDPOINT=https://hf-mirror.com if HuggingFace is slow in your region). Measured on a 2080 Ti, bilingual query.

Office documents, PDF tables, web pages, org files, chat logs

• PDFs: with the [pdf] extra, PyMuPDF4LLM extracts pages as markdown — tables come through as pipe rows (plain pypdf text is the fallback)
• Word: with the [docx] extra, .docx paragraphs and table rows are indexed
• HTML: .html / .htm pages become text with headings preserved (stdlib html.parser, zero dependencies — <meta charset> honored, script/style skipped)
• org-mode: .org notes convert faithfully — #+TITLE becomes the h1 with *-sections nested under it, #+FILETAGS become searchable tags
• Chat exports: drop a ChatGPT or Claude conversations.json into any source directory — it becomes one searchable document per conversation, tagged chatlog (search --tag chatlog scopes to chat history)

How it relates to Obsidian / your note app

It doesn't compete — the two layer up. Obsidian (or any editor) is the note-taking frontend; this is the cross-vault search engine: point sources at any directories (Obsidian vaults, project docs, chat exports) and query all of them at once — from your terminal, your scripts, or your AI agent via MCP. Obsidian-native details are understood: frontmatter tags: (filter with search --tag), [[wikilinks]] (walk the graph with links), code blocks are never cut mid-block, and one-line notes stay searchable.

How it works

%%{init: {'theme':'base','themeVariables':{'background':'#000000','primaryColor':'#000000','primaryTextColor':'#00FF41','primaryBorderColor':'#00FF41','lineColor':'#00FF41','secondaryColor':'#001a00','tertiaryColor':'#000000','clusterBkg':'#000000','clusterBorder':'#00FF41','edgeLabelBackground':'#000000','fontSize':'14px','fontFamily':'trebuchet ms, verdana, arial, sans-serif'},'themeCSS':'.nodeLabel { color: #00FF41 !important; } .edgeLabel { background: #000 !important; color: #00FF41 !important; } .cluster-label { color: #00FF41 !important; }'}}%%
flowchart LR
    subgraph sources["📥 Your machine"]
        notes["Obsidian / markdown notes"]
        docs["PDF tables · docx · project docs"]
        chats["ChatGPT / Claude exports"]
        mem["memories/ — agent-written notes"]
        wikidir["wiki/ — consolidated pages"]
    end

    subgraph loci["🧠 loci — local index, nothing leaves the machine"]
        ingest["ingest / watch<br>loaders → chunker → embedder"]
        store[("ChromaDB<br>hybrid index")]
        retrieve["hybrid retrieval<br>vector + BM25 → RRF"]
        mcp["loci-mcp<br>8 tools · resources · prompts"]
    end

    subgraph hosts["🖥️ Your AI hosts"]
        ide["Claude Code · Qoder · Trae<br>Cursor · Cline"]
        desktop["Claude Desktop"]
        term["Terminal<br>search / ask / chat / wiki"]
    end

    api["☁️ OpenAI-compatible API<br>Zhipu / DeepSeek / Kimi / OpenAI<br>or 100% offline via Ollama"]

    sources --> ingest --> store
    mem -. auto-indexed .-> store
    wikidir -. auto-indexed .-> store
    store --> retrieve
    retrieve --> term
    retrieve --> mcp
    mcp <--> ide
    mcp <-.-> desktop
    retrieve -. "embedding + chat calls only" .-> api

The write path in one line: loaders → chunker (heading-aware split) → embedder → store (ChromaDB, persistent) — incremental, deduplicated by content hash.

Install & quick start

Requires Python 3.11+ (uses the stdlib tomllib).

# option A: install from PyPI (adds `loci` and `loci-mcp` commands)
pip install "loci-rag[pdf,docx]"   # optional extras: PDF w/ tables, Word documents

# option B: zero-install quickstart
pip install -r requirements.txt

# 1. Configure: copy the example and fill in your values
cp config.example.toml config.toml

# 2. Ingest (incremental — deduplicated by content hash, safe to re-run)
loci ingest            # or: python main.py ingest

# 3. Ask
loci ask "what did I write about X?"

The workflow

%%{init: {'theme':'base','themeVariables':{'background':'#000000','primaryColor':'#000000','primaryTextColor':'#00FF41','primaryBorderColor':'#00FF41','lineColor':'#00FF41','secondaryColor':'#001a00','tertiaryColor':'#000000','clusterBkg':'#000000','clusterBorder':'#00FF41','edgeLabelBackground':'#000000','fontSize':'14px','fontFamily':'trebuchet ms, verdana, arial, sans-serif'},'themeCSS':'.nodeLabel { color: #00FF41 !important; } .edgeLabel { background: #000 !important; color: #00FF41 !important; } .cluster-label { color: #00FF41 !important; }'}}%%
flowchart TD
    A["pip install loci-rag"] --> B["cp config.example.toml config.toml<br>fill API keys + source dirs"]
    B --> C["loci ingest — hybrid index built"]
    C --> D["loci watch — index stays fresh (optional)"]
    C --> E{"What do you need?"}
    E -->|"a synthesized answer"| F["loci ask --verify<br>claim-by-claim audit"]
    E -->|"raw excerpts to quote"| G["loci search --tag memory"]
    E -->|"back-and-forth"| H["loci chat"]
    E -->|"scattered notes on a topic"| I["loci wiki topic<br>consolidate into a wiki page"]
    F --> J["loci remember —<br>keep what you learned"]
    I --> J

Commands