Remnic
Open-source memory and context for user-aware agents.
Remnic is for agents that need to understand the people they work with over time.
Remnic helps AI agents understand the people they work with: their preferences, projects, constraints, decisions, patterns, and definition of good. The goal is simple: agents that remember responsibly, retrieve the right context, and ask fewer unnecessary questions.
Remnic is not just a memory store. It is an exploration of the systems layer around user-aware agents: scoped memory, provenance, retrieval quality, correction, boundaries, and evals.
Why this matters
Most agents do not fail because they lack another prompt. They fail because they do not understand the user, the project, the boundaries, or what “good” means in context.
Remnic explores the systems layer needed for user-aware agents:
- what to remember
- where that memory applies
- why it was retrieved
- when it should expire
- how users correct it
- when the agent should ask instead of act
- how to evaluate whether memory improved the outcome
The trace is noise. The primitive is the product. Remnic's job is the pipeline that distills hours of agent conversation into compressed, searchable, durable memory primitives. (How it works →)
Creator and maintainer of Remnic: Joshua Warren.
OpenAI / Codex / MCP
Remnic exposes memory and context through HTTP and MCP surfaces and includes integrations for agentic development workflows such as Codex CLI, Claude Code, Replit, and other MCP clients.
The long-term goal is to make memory inspectable, scoped, correctable, and measurable across agent workflows.
Try the no-key Coding Agent Memory Demo for a five-minute walkthrough where real Remnic memoryStore() and recallXray() calls carry a scoped project decision/preference across two coding-agent session identities.
Engram -> Remnic
Engram is now Remnic. Canonical packages live under the @remnic/* scope:
@remnic/core,
@remnic/server,
@remnic/cli.
OpenClaw installs should use @remnic/plugin-openclaw.
The legacy engram CLI name remains available as a forwarder during the rename window.
Hermes users: remnic-hermes v1.0.2 on PyPI.
Support Remnic
Every bit of support is genuinely appreciated and helps keep this project alive and free for everyone.
If you're able to, sponsoring on GitHub or sending a Lightning donation to joshuaswarren@strike.me directly funds continued development, new integrations, and keeping Remnic open source.
If financial support isn't an option, you can still make a big difference — star the repo on GitHub, share it on social media, or recommend it to a friend or colleague. Word of mouth is how most people find Remnic, and it means the world.
The Problem
Every AI agent session starts from zero. Your agent doesn't know your name, your projects, the decisions you've already made, or the bugs you already debugged. Whether it's a personal assistant, a coding agent, a research agent, or a multi-agent team — they all forget everything between conversations. You re-explain the same context over and over, and your agents still make the same mistakes.
OpenClaw's built-in memory works for simple cases, but it doesn't scale. It lacks semantic search, lifecycle management, entity tracking, and governance. Third-party memory services exist, but they cost money and require sending your private data to someone else's servers.
The Solution
Remnic is an open-source memory and context layer for user-aware agents. It watches agent conversations, extracts durable knowledge, and injects the right context back when it is needed. Route extraction through the OpenClaw gateway model chain, OpenAI, or a local LLM (Ollama, LM Studio, etc.) -- your choice.
Remnic helps agents understand the people they work with: preferences, projects, constraints, decisions, patterns, and definitions of good. It works natively with OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Pi Coding Agent, Oh My Pi (omp), Hermes Agent, and any MCP-compatible client (Replit, Cursor, etc.). When you tell any agent a preference, every agent can use the same governed memory store.
Local-first storage is a trust feature. All data can stay on your machine as plain markdown files: no cloud dependency, no subscription, and no third-party memory service required.
Architecture rule: standalone Remnic is first-class. @remnic/core, @remnic/server, and @remnic/cli own the memory engine and must stay host-agnostic. OpenClaw, Hermes, Codex, Claude Code, and future integrations are thin adapters over that shared core, and adapter work should always follow the host's current upstream SDK and documentation instead of recreating host-native behavior inside Remnic.
| Without Remnic | With Remnic |
|---|---|
| Re-explain who you are and what you're working on | Agent recalls your identity, projects, and preferences automatically |
| Repeat context for every task | Entity knowledge surfaces people, projects, tools, and relationships on demand |
| Lose debugging and research context between sessions | Past root causes, dead ends, and findings are recalled — no repeated work |
| Manually restate preferences every session | Preferences persist across sessions, agents, and projects |
| Context-switching tax when resuming work | Session-start recall brings you back to speed instantly |
| Default OpenClaw memory doesn't scale | Hybrid search, lifecycle management, namespaces, and governance |
| Third-party memory services cost money and share your data | Everything stays local — your filesystem, your rules |
Memory or context substrate? Both.
There's a useful split in the AI-memory space between memory backends (extract facts → vector DB → retrieve relevant ones) and context substrates (structured human-readable context that accumulates across sessions and compounds over time). Most tools land firmly in one camp. Remnic does both.
The files are the source of truth. Every memory is a markdown file with YAML frontmatter on your filesystem. You can cat, grep, edit, version-control, back up, and reason about your memory with standard tools. The hybrid search index (QMD: BM25 + vector + reranking) is downstream of the files — fully rebuildable from disk, never the source of truth itself.
The recall stays sharp. Three retrieval tiers (chunk → section → raw transcript), feature-flagged graph retrieval with Personalized PageRank, memory-worth scoring that filters low-value facts before they reach the LLM, temporal supersession that keeps stale facts out of recall, and Recall X-ray so you can see exactly which tier produced each result and why.
It compounds. Background consolidation (the "dreams" surface) merges duplicates, promotes recurring themes, and snapshots page versions on every overwrite. Provenance fields (derived_from, derived_via) track where every consolidated memory came from. Procedural memory (on by default) captures multi-step runbooks. The longer you use it, the better it gets — and you can always read exactly what it knows.
Camp 1 asks "what should the AI remember?" Remnic answers that. Camp 2 asks "what context should the AI work inside?" Remnic answers that too.
Quick install (OpenClaw)
If you have OpenClaw installed, the fastest path to working Remnic memory is:
# 1. Install the plugin package
openclaw plugins install clawhub:@remnic/plugin-openclaw
# 2. Wire up the memory slot automatically
remnic openclaw install
# 3. Restart the gateway
launchctl kickstart -k gui/$(id -u)/ai.openclaw.gateway
# 4. Verify everything is working
remnic doctor
remnic openclaw install writes plugins.entries["openclaw-remnic"] and plugins.slots.memory = "openclaw-remnic" to ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json. Without the slot, hooks never fire — see Troubleshooting: hooks aren't firing for details.
Migrating from the legacy @joshuaswarren/openclaw-engram package? Run
remnic openclaw migrate-engram --yes; it backs up the legacy extension,
installs @remnic/plugin-openclaw, preserves memoryDir, and switches the
OpenClaw memory slot to openclaw-remnic. See the
OpenClaw Engram to Remnic migration guide.
Installation
Option 1: Install from the CLI
openclaw plugins install clawhub:@remnic/plugin-openclaw
Option 2: Ask your OpenClaw agent to install it
Tell any OpenClaw agent:
Install the @remnic/plugin-openclaw plugin and configure it as my memory system.
Your agent will run the install command, update openclaw.json, and restart the gateway for you.
Option 3: Developer install from source
git clone https://github.com/joshuaswarren/remnic.git \
~/.openclaw/extensions/remnic
cd ~/.openclaw/extensions/remnic
pnpm install && pnpm run build
Note: