🦛 Hippo

Your corrections, remembered by Claude Code, Codex and Cursor.

Hippo is open-source memory that runs on your machine and gives the rules it captured back to the agent when a new session starts. In our Claude Code test on 29 repositories, adding it to built-in memory cut repeat mistakes from 21 in 100 to 11, at the same cost.

Hippo keeps your coding agents' memories in a SQLite store on your machine, with markdown mirrors you can read and commit. Search is BM25 out of the box, with no model and no network call; embeddings are an optional install. hippo init installs hooks for Claude Code and OpenCode, adds 2 hooks to Codex's hooks.json when Codex is installed (Codex runs them once you trust them in /hooks), and adds instructions to an existing AGENTS.md for Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw and Pi. Any MCP client can connect. Mark a memory wrong and it ranks lower; run hippo supersede and the old fact leaves recall. Zero runtime deps.

Install it, then run hippo init inside one project. Init creates the project's .hippo/ store and adds a block to the CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md already there. On your machine it adds hooks for the agents it finds, such as Claude Code's in ~/.claude/settings.json, and a daily 6:15am run. What hippo init changes lists all of it and the flags that skip each part.

npm install -g hippo-memory && hippo init

Setting up every git repo under a folder in one go is a second step. The Quick start says what it changes, then gives the command.

Installing the package alone captures nothing, and what runs after init depends on the agent.

Having an AI agent install it? Point it at llms-install.md: it installs, wires hippo into the agents it finds, and verifies with hippo doctor.

Works with:    Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, OpenCode, Pi, any MCP client
Imports from:  ChatGPT, Claude (CLAUDE.md), Cursor (.cursorrules), Slack, markdown
Storage:       SQLite backbone with markdown mirrors. Git-trackable, human-readable.
Dependencies:  Zero runtime deps. Node.js 22.16+. Optional embeddings: bring-your-own local Transformers.js (`npm i @huggingface/transformers`, or legacy `@xenova/transformers`) or an opt-in API embedder (OpenAI/Voyage/Cohere). Nothing is auto-installed.

Contents: Why · Receipts · Quick start · Agent setup · MCP server · How it works · Features · CLI · Comparison · Benchmarks · FAQ · Contributing

Why this exists

Most "AI memory" systems save everything and search later. That's storage with search on top. A note that turned out wrong ranks the same as one that held up, and an old fact sits beside the one that replaced it.

Hippo learns from outcomes. When a recalled memory turns out wrong, mark it bad and it drops out of the top results. Memories you keep using get stronger. Those two are the parts we measured helping retrieval, on a synthetic test ([mechanism audit, round 2](https://github.com/kitfunso/hippo-memory/pull

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