io.github.phasespace-labs/palinode

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The memory substrate for AI agents and developer tools. Git-versioned, file-native, MCP-first.

Your agent's memory is a folder of markdown files. Palinode indexes them with hybrid search, compacts them with an LLM, and serves them through MCP — so the same memory works in Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, VS Code (Continue/Cline), and any other MCP-compatible editor. Bring your own Obsidian vault, or use Palinode as one: palinode init --obsidian /path/to/vault scaffolds a full vault with graph defaults, daily-notes wiring, and an LLM-maintained wiki contract. Enterprises can govern AI memory the same way they govern code. If every service crashes, cat still works.

A palinode is a poem that retracts what was said before and says it better. That's what memory compaction does.

Supported Platforms

All platforms share the same MCP server — install once on your server, connect from any IDE. See docs/MCP-SETUP.md and docs/MCP-INSTALL-RECIPES.md for per-client config snippets.

The Idea

Most agent memory is a black box. You can't read it, you can't diff it, you can't grep it when the vector DB is down. Palinode bets on plain files as the source of truth and builds everything else as a derived index.

Files (markdown + YAML frontmatter)
  ↓ watched
Index (SQLite-vec vectors + FTS5 keywords, single .db file)
  ↓ queried by
Interfaces (MCP server, REST API, CLI, OpenClaw plugin)
  ↓ compacted by
LLM (proposes ops → deterministic executor applies them → git commits)

That's the whole architecture. One directory of .md files, one SQLite database, one API server. No Postgres, no Redis, no cloud dependency.

One Backend, Every Interface

Palinode doesn't care how you talk to it. The full toolkit — save, search, doctor, dedup-suggest, orphan-repair, diff, blame, rollback, and more — works through every interface:

Set up once on a server. Connect from any machine, any IDE, any agent framework. The MCP server is a pure HTTP client — it holds no state, no database connection, no embedder. Point it at the API and go.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "palinode": { "type": "http", "url": "http://your-server:6341/mcp/" }
  }
}

That's the entire client config. Works with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Zed, and VS Code (Continue/Cline). palinode-mcp-sse serves streamable-HTTP at /mcp/ — the binary name is historical; use "type": "http", not "type": "sse". Always include the trailing slash in the URL. See docs/MCP-SETUP.md for editor-specific install recipes.

How It Works

Store — Typed markdown files (people, projects, decisions, insights) with YAML frontmatter. Git-versioned. Human-readable. Edi

... View full README on GitHub