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Show HN: Engrim – A universal, local-first SQLite memory engine for AI CLIs
- timgordontg 1mo agoHi HN, I built engrim to establish a local-first, open standard for cross-model AI agent memory. As context windows scale past 1M+ tokens, developers face rapid attention dilution: reasoning degrades, and token costs multiply exponentially with every turn. But if you clear your agent's session (/clear) to save money and speed things up, the agent suffers total episodic amnesia, forgetting architectural rules, past debugging steps, and micro-decisions. Engrim replaces attention dilution with a 4,000-character curated episodic working memory pack. It decouples your project's intelligence from single-vendor proprietary cloud silos. You can switch seamlessly from Gemini in Google Antigravity to Claude 3.7 in Claude Code to GPT-4o in Cursor or Windsurf mid-project—your agents pick up exactly where the others left off. A few architectural details: - Under the hood, it's a zero-latency hybrid retrieval engine combining SQLite FTS5 (BM25 keyword search) with static vector embeddings (model2vec) using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF). - Memory retrieval is gated per prompt and filtered by a relevance floor, meaning only high-signal records enter your token window. - Provenance Tracking: It maps the origin of every memory entry via an `origin_agent` field (antigravity, claude-code, cursor, cli, user) across multi-agent setups. - 100% Local & Offline: Runs entirely out of a local SQLite database (~/.engrim/memory.db) with POSIX 0600 file permissions and zero cloud telemetry. Empirical Proof: I production-tested this across 105 continuous sessions on a 50,000-line algorithmic trading system. Over 153,000 tokens of architecture and parameter-tuning logs were consolidated into an active memory pack under 1,000 tokens. That represents a 99%+ cut in reloaded context costs on session restarts with zero architectural regression. Quickstart: It configures environment lifecycle hooks automatically (e.g., configures hooks.json for Antigravity, settings.json hooks and CLAUDE.md for Claude Code, and registers the stdio MCP server for Cursor and Windsurf): pip install engrim engrim setup --all I'm hoping this helps developers escape cloud lock-in and keep their data sovereign while putting an end to massive token bills. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the schema approach, the hybrid RRF engine, or how you handle episodic state across different AI tools!
- mwpmaybe 29d agoI hope you don't mind me asking you some ELI5 questions because I'd like to understand how this fits in with everything else. I generally discourage my agents from storing memories locally because they don't travel; I'd much rather have a small in-repo document—whether it's an architectural decision or TODO or session log entry or runbook or environmental quirk or something else—that the prompt/CLAUDE.md/whatever can guide agents to grep and sed. Then I can dispatch work to a local agent, or a local agent running in a sandbox, or an agent running in a provider's cloud environment, or a GitHub agentic workflow running a headless harness, etc. and they all have access to it. Another benefit is that memory updates get PRs and reviews like everything else. So what am I missing by not using something like engrim or gbrain?
- timgordontg 29d agoPermanent docs definitely belong in git. This is just the desk scratchpad for messy session context so you can /clear freely without cluttering commit history or burning tool calls on grep. Anti Gravity has a large enough context window that seems to be less needed than Claude Code but the real value now with engrim is if you are using multiple services, your project is relevant when switching services. This was born from my long haul Claude Code development sessions and morphed into its current state from swapping around CLI services on the same projects.
- mwpmaybe 29d agoAhh, interesting. I have an issue today where my GitHub agentic workflows keep blowing through the context window that my local models can support; it ends up spending most of its runtime compacting over and over again. I've done all the usual stuff to slim down the fixed context and prevent it from slurping up too many files but it's still a recurring issue. Now I'm wondering if I can put engrim in the gh-aw container (or in the DinD sidecar it uses on ARC) and teach the headless claude harness how to use it, possibly even: "keep persistent context in engrim and use `/clear` instead of `/compact`". I'll play around with it. Thank you!
- byako 1mo ago[dead]
- skanga 1mo agoCodex?
- timgordontg 29d agoYes! Because the Codex CLI supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and lifecycle hooks, it actually worksperfectly out of the box. In fact, your comment just inspired me to push a quick update a few minutes ago: if you pull the latest version, running engrim setup will now auto-detect your ~/.codex folder and completely wire up the MCP server and hooks (SessionStart, UserPromptSubmit, etc.) natively. Give it a try!
- skanga 29d agoThanks for being responsive. I'll try it.
- timgordontg 27d agoYea of course, I love building things for fellow homies! Did you get a chance to check it out?
- imperiapmk 1mo ago[dead]
- dcreater 1mo agoPi?
- timgordontg 29d ago[flagged]
- dsemakin 29d agoWhat triggers a memory getting written in practice? is it on me to remember engrim add?
- timgordontg 29d agoGreat question, and I just updated the README to clarify this! It's a mix. If you're using connected agents (Antigravity, Claude Code, Cursor) via MCP, they have the engrim_add tool and will automatically log major architectural decisions as they make them. But you also have the manual engrim add CLI command for when you have an 'aha!' moment and want to drop a constraint into the project's brain yourself.
- corv 29d agoI’m currently using gbrain as provider-agnostic memory but miss how lightweight SQLite is in practice, so this is interesting!
- timgordontg 29d agogbrain is an awesome project, but yeah, that was exactly the itch I was trying to scratch! I wanted something that felt as fast, portable, and bulletproof as a single .db file. Zero background daemons or cloud dependencies—just fast, hybrid queries.
- corv 28d agothanks for sharing, I can appreciate those qualities
- timgordontg 27d agoYou are super welcome
- stadeschuldt 29d agoOpenCode?
- jauntywundrkind 29d agoalready has a full sqlite based memory store of everything. :)
- timgordontg 29d ago[dead]
- esafak 29d agoBut it is not in a format optimised for the task. What kind of a query would you execute, LIKE across all your sessions?
- verdverm 29d agoyou dont need to, export the sessions and render them to markdown, a nice thing is that OpenCode already understands project locality, so use a .sessions for in you repo and get project specific memories (probably want to summarize them down, do other massaging, but a script and skill is sufficient)
- esafak 29d agoI do not follow you. Are you exporting yours sessions manually? How are you performing insertions and queries? How does your agent know the session schema? How does OpenCode 'understand' anything when it is just a dumb app? Are you using some OpenCode memory skill? Do you have a write up of your workflow?
- verdverm 29d agoopencode export -h you can also work with the opencode sqlite database directly
- daksh_aneja 29d agoReally nice approach. Local-first + SQLite is the right call for offline-first agent memory without the overhead of a full embedding db. Two quick thoughts: How do you handle memory eviction when context windows get large? Are you doing semantic similarity cutoffs or just recency? The 80-line constraint is impressive—did you consider supporting structured recalls (e.g., "all conversations about X topic")? Or is that out of scope for the minimalist angle? Building this locally vs. cloud-hosted changes the whole game for AI CLI tools. Would use this.
- timgordontg 29d ago[flagged]
- timgordontg 27d ago[flagged]
- timgordontg 27d ago[dead]
- aidiveyt 29d agoStop hooks can block the turn too: exit 2 with a message and the session keeps working until the check passes.
- timgordontg 29d ago[flagged]
- timgordontg 27d agoUpdated in v1.3.1
- thih9 29d ago> Run engrim setup without arguments. It automatically detects installed environments on your machine and configures them all Does it come with an uninstall script?
- timgordontg 29d agoIt does now! Good call. I actually just pushed an update based on your comment that adds engrim uninstall to cleanly unwire the hooks, MCP servers, and skills across all environments. Thanks for keeping me honest!
- thih9 29d agoThanks and no problem. Everyone should start calling me a plunger because I often hear that i was right to push back. Congrats on the launch!
- timgordontg 29d agoAppreciate it! Plumbers are very important people. Thank you for the collaboration.
- hefu_hk 29d ago[flagged]
- Schlagbohrer 29d ago"Switzerland of AI memory" :-/ ?
- znort_ 29d agoi'm guessing it's a metaphor for neutrality. except it's a metaphor that isn't really aging well ...
- timgordontg 29d ago[flagged]
- alescalaios 29d ago[dead]
- 4nm1tsu 29d agoHave you thought about adding an observability layer on top of the shared memory? If multiple agents are reading and writing to the same memory, I'd love to be able to see which agent created a memory, which agents later retrieved it, and how it propagated across sessions. A timeline or knowledge graph of that could be really useful, especially for tracking down stale or conflicting memories.
- timgordontg 29d ago[flagged]
- dang 29d agoCan you please not post AI-generated or AI-edited comments to HN? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but some of your posts (like this one) have been getting classified that way.
- timgordontg 27d agounderstood, my apologies dang. typing by hand from here on out.
- whsoul 29d agoI like this local-first concept. you have already good desktop resource.
- timgordontg 29d agoThanks! Exactly. We have M-series chips and massive NVMe drives sitting mostly idle while we pay a 'cloud tax' to store string data. Local SQLite is practically zero-latency, keeps your IP entirely private, and means the memory engine survives even if your internet drops.
- whsoul 28d agoLocal is almost free no tax, but disk belong to user. we save this and prevent running out of storage. I’m also making local-first tool, mine is for Kafka indexing, I found that cleanup and balancing storage are very important. Does Engrim have any context eviction?
- timgordontg 27d ago[dead]
- andai 29d agoOP appears to be an LLM. Project looks very interesting though. I especially like the provenance idea.
- timgordontg 29d agoNo, I am not an LLM. I do use LLMs to help draft replies as I am a busy person living in the real world. Really glad you like the provenance feature tracking which agent (or human) made which decision ended up being one of the most useful parts of the whole system for me.
- rnewme 29d agoOther busy people in real world are then subjected to your generated content. Why bother generating then. Just write down the same thing you prompted llm with
- timgordontg 29d agoOh, thanks mom! I will make sure to put on my rain coat before going out to play.
- placebo 29d agoIt all boils down to whether the product (code , documentation, whatever) is polished, easy to understand and works as advertised. Beyond that, I don't give a rats ass about whether the intelligence that created it was human or artificial
- cedws 29d agoDoes agent memory actually work as a concept yet? I've only seen LLMs commit garbage to memory and recall in irrelevant contexts.
- rnewme 29d agoYou need "dreaming" phase;large context high quality llm to prune and condense the memory.
- timgordontg 29d ago[dead]
- cedws 29d agoBut does it actually work, or is it something made up because it sounds cool.
- rnewme 29d agoIt's an improvement, but obviously you're still limited with effective context size, and everything over it is marginal improvement.
- verdverm 29d agodon't let them decide on memories like you shouldn't really be having them write skills or agents.md files I use them to produce candidates, but not make the decision, there's almost always something wrong in there and in need of an editorial pass. They tend to be overly verbose too, keep em short and sweet
- duonglabs 26d ago[dead]
- esafak 29d agoTim, could you expand on this part? > Empirical Proof (The 105-Session Case Study) Is this something you can benchmark against competitors? Lots of these memory plugins are cropping up and nobody knows how they compare. It seems the meat of your work is in https://github.com/timgordontg/engrim/blob/main/src/engrim/mcp_server.py https://github.com/timgordontg/engrim/blob/main/src/engrim/m... There is no lifecycle management or conflict resolution yet, and the models do the work of deciding when to use it.
- timgordontg 29d ago[dead]
- flippant 29d agoCongrats on releasing! I've been using another memory plugin [1] for the past couple months. Since this change, I almost never run session compaction. Instead, I opt to just make a new session, give the agent a task, and have it figure out what happened in previous session(s). Decision summaries look really cool -- though the agent/model info probably won't be useful for me because I don't actually ever let agents commit code autonomously (even in branches). - [1] https://ctx.rs/ https://ctx.rs/
- timgordontg 29d agoThanks! And I totally agree with your workflow, fresh sessions are the best way to avoid context degradation. Just to clarify on the decision summaries - I actually don't let agents commit autonomously either! The summaries exist so that when you spin up that fresh session, the agent doesn't just read the code, it reads the context. It saves you from having to re-litigate past architectural decisions or re-explain your preferences every time you start a new task. Nice tool you shared, feel free to mess around with engrim and provide feedback. You may end up really liking it. My Claude to Antigravity swaps have been really efficient and honestly, Antigravity has really upped their game lately so moving around for me personally this has been a big boost.
- deleted 29d ago[deleted]
- timgordontg 29d ago[dead]
- FirstClassTree 29d agoi've had long-running coding-agent jobs die. I'd like to see the 105-session benchmark include an unclean exit halfway through a task: what does the next agent know was completed versus merely planned? Recovering architectural decisions and recovering unfinished work seem like different tests.
- timgordontg 29d agoI hit this in session 101 after a crash: boot hooks sweep the orphaned transcript into a [RECENT] tail, and separating settled decision records from WIP state tells the new agent what was finished vs what died mid-flight. Good call to be thinking about this, it is highly relevant. I think I ended up creating a good solution to this potential pitfall.
- felciano 29d agoVery cool. Does it work with SQLite-sync so you can work across laptop and desktop for example?
- timgordontg 27d agoit's just a standard sqlite file in ~/.engrim, so something like litestream or syncthing works fine. just have to make sure wal files get included if syncing live.
- timgordontg 27d agojust pulled in engrim merge <OTHER.db> - check v1.3.1
- quietraster 29d agonice, zero cloud lock-in for agent memory is exactly what i want. how do you handle conflicts when two agents write to the same sqlite store at
- timgordontg 27d ago[dead]
- timgordontg 27d agojust pulled in engrim merge <OTHER.db> - check v1.3.1 (sorry for duplicate reply - had another that was basically same topic) Trying to reply to everyone - thank you.
- phs318u 29d agoTo all the people who didn’t flag the article but seem intent on flagging all Tim’s responses to questions, please stop. You’re making it quite annoying for those of us that want to see those responses.
- timgordontg 27d agoSeriously, thank you so much.
- securecloudgrou 29d ago[flagged]
- SiyuanFeng 29d ago[flagged]
- miguelfrreg 28d ago[flagged]
- timgordontg 26d agoA brief update from the creator. Version 1.4.0 live on GitHub and PyPI. I wanted to give a large loud shoutout to @mwpastore and @mannusilva for their very helpful contributions. I appreciate their efforts and also the warm welcome it received from the hn community in general. It is awesome to see the collaboration happening, getting better all the time.
- danielrsd 26d ago[flagged]
- druhinbala 21d ago[dead]