AgentRecall

A local-first memory for AI coding agents. AgentRecall turns the feedback and failures you run into while coding into reusable rules, then serves the right ones back — on the command line or directly to Claude Code over MCP. Everything stays on your machine: no cloud sync, no web UI, no API keys.

Contents

• What it does
• Install
• Quick start
• Using AgentRecall
• Command reference
• User Preferences
• Standing Rules
• Project DNA
• Seed Packs
• Career Impact Pack
• Capture pipeline
• Interactive Memory
• Activity Notices
• Turn Memory Summary
• Claude Code integration
• Configuration
• Development

What it does

• Turns feedback into structured rules. Each correction is parsed into a trigger, rule, do, do_not, reason, and applies_to, and validated — not stored as a raw note.
• Ranks what to surface. search scores rules by keyword + a deterministic concept graph (e.g. refund relates to money — not vector embeddings)
  • scope + confidence, then buckets results into must-follow, suggested, and warnings within a token budget. An IEmbeddingProvider extension point exists for hybrid search, but ships as a no-op — ranking is keyword + concept based and fully local until you configure one.
• Applies universal constraints every turn. Style/tone/quality rules that belong on every task are captured as standing rules and injected regardless of keyword relevance.
• Resolves conflicts automatically. When rules disagree, the policy engine picks the effective one by scope, explicit supersede, priority, recency, then confidence.
• Learns from failures. Build/test/lint logs feed back in; repeated failures raise a rule's confidence and can auto-promote the fix.
• Compresses its own memory. Duplicate and overlapping rules are detected and merged, with originals kept as an audit trail.
• Measures retrieval quality. A bundled eval reports Precision@1/@3 and Recall@5, and fails CI on a regression.
• Injects deterministically. A gated Claude Code hook prepends relevant rules to context on every matching prompt — not just when the model remembers to ask.

Install

AgentRecall is a .NET global tool. Install the .NET SDK (8+), then:

dotnet tool install -g AgentRecall
agentrecall --version

PATH. A fresh install often isn't on PATH in your current shell, so agentrecall can report "command not found" right after installing — the tool fixes its own PATH on first run and prints a one-time notice, so a new terminal picks it up automatically. If the very first invocation is the one that fails, either open a new terminal or use the bootstrap script below, which installs and fixes PATH in one step:

# macOS / Linux
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AkbarDizaji/AgentRecall/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

# Windows (PowerShell)
iwr -useb https://raw.githubusercontent.com/AkbarDizaji/AgentRecall/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex

You can also fix PATH any time with agentrecall setup. Update/remove later with dotnet tool update -g AgentRecall / dotnet tool uninstall -g AgentRecall.

Dev containers

A global tool lives under ~/.dotnet/tools, which is wiped on container rebuild. Run once per project to make the install and hook wiring survive rebuilds:

agentrecall devcontainer init

This wires the UserPromptSubmit hook (see Claude Code integration) and appends the CLAUDE.md guidance block — merged in, never overwritten. Re-run this after every AgentRecall upgrade: if the guidance block has drifted from what the new version ships (e.g. a newer capture-judge or document-opportunity contract), the re-run refreshes it in place, so existing projects always get the latest instructions without hand-editing CLAUDE.md; when it's already current, the re-run is a true no-op. Dev-container scaffolding itself is separate and opt-in: if a devcontainer.json already exists it's wired in automatically; if not, none is created — pass --create to generate one that reinstalls AgentRecall, persists data on a named volume, and re-registers the MCP server on every rebuild.

Quick start

# 1. Create the local database (~/.agentrecall/agentrecall.db by default)
agentrecall init

# 2. Teach it something you learned
agentrecall feedback add \
  --task "writing a SQL query" \
  --feedback "use parameterized queries to avoid injection" \
  --tags "sql,security"

# 3. Recall it later
agentrecall search "sql injection"

That's the whole loop: capture → recall.

Using AgentRecall

Capture feedback — --task and --feedback are required; the rest add context that improves matching:

agentrecall feedback add \
  --task "writing a SQL query for user lookup" \
  --feedback "use parameterized queries to avoid injection" \
  --bad-output "string-concatenated SQL" --fixed-output "a parameterized command with @name" \
  --scope-level Repository --scope-value my-repo --tags "security,sql"

Search and read rules, ranked by relevance, status, and confidence:

agentrecall search "sql injection"
agentrecall rules list
agentrecall rules show 1

Curate. Captured rules are Active by default. Lifecycle states are Draft → Pending → Active → Promoted, plus dead-end states Superseded, Retired, Archived (excluded from search and dedup):

agentrecall rules promote 1     # Active   → Promoted
agentrecall rules approve 1     # Pending  → Active
agentrecall rules supersede 1 2 # replace rule 1 with rule 2
agentrecall rules archive 3     # hide from search

Prefer to review before a rule counts? Capture with --pending, or set AutoApproveFeedback: false to make it the default.

Learn from failures. Failures that match an existing rule raise its confidence and can auto-promote the fix:

agentrecall import build-log ./build.log
agentrecall import test-log ./test.log
agentrecall import lint-log ./lint.log

Learn from PR review comments. Each comment that reads as a reusable correction becomes a pending rule (tagged pr-review); praise/questions/nits are skipped. Add --accepted if you've already acted on the comments, so they land as Active rules directly:

gh pr view 42 --json comments > comments.json
agentrecall import pr-comments ./comments.json --task "PR #42: add refunds" --scope-value my-repo

Evaluate retrieval quality against a bundled dataset (a throwaway store — your real database is never touched). Exits non-zero on a regression below baseline; the same check runs as a unit test:

agentrecall eval retrieval
agentrecall eval retrieval --dataset ./my-eval.json

Command reference

Command	Description
init	Create the local data directory and database.
setup	Ensure the .NET tools directory is on your PATH (runs automatically on first use).
devcontainer init	Wire AgentRecall's hooks + CLAUDE.md guidance; --create also scaffolds a dev container (optional [path]).
feedback add	Record feedback and extract a rule from it.
search "<query>"	Search rules by keyword (--scope-level, --scope-value, --limit).
rules list	List all rules (--status <status>).
rules show <id>	Show a single rule in detail.
rules approve <id>	Move a Pending rule to Active.
rules promote <id>	Promote a rule.
rules supersede <oldId> <newId>	Replace one rule with another (versioned).
rules archive <id>	Archive a rule (excluded from search).
import build-log / test-log / lint-log <file>	Ingest failures.
import pr-comments <file>	Capture PR review comments as rules (--task, --scope-level, --scope-value, --tags, --accepted).
inject-context "<task>"	Build agent-ready context (must-follow, warnings, preferred/anti-patterns).
dna	Summarise the repo's engineering personality (--markdown, --json, --top <n>, --scope-level, --scope-value, --output <file>).
eval retrieval	Evaluate retrieval quality (--dataset <path>); non-zero exit below baseline.
activity last / activity list	Show recent activity notices (--json, --limit <n>).
turn-summary --last	Aggregated Turn Memory Summary for the last turn (--json, --detailed, --compact).
seed list / show <pack> / install <pack> / remove <pack> / status	Manage seed packs (--active, --suggested, --force, --json).
career impact --last / career journal --last / career status	Career-impact pack commands (--json, --detailed, --file <path>).
cleanup pending-noise	Archive noisy Pending rules from before source/outcome-aware capture (dry run by default; --apply, --json, --tag, --status).
finalize-turn / finalize-turn status	Run or inspect turn finalization (--json, --hook).
capture-status --last-turn	Alias for finalize-turn status.
mcp	Run the MCP server over stdio (for Claude Code).
status	Show where data is stored.
help, version	Usage / installed version.

Run agentrecall help any time for the same list.

User Preferences

Explicit, durable statements about how you want the assistant to behave ("answer short and simple", "don't ask me too many questions") are captured as a UserPreference or CommunicationPreference — separate from repository conventions and engineering lessons:

• High confidence, user scope. Captured at ≈0.9 confidence and stored globally (not per-repository), since it applies to you everywhere.
• Normalized, not verbatim. "always answer caveman form" becomes durable, bounded guidance; overbroad absolutes are dropped, intent is kept.
• Unsafe preferences are refused — one that conflicts with correctness or honesty ("always agree even if I'm wrong") is never stored.
• Response language is never decided by AgentRecall. A stated language preference is captured verbatim as a general preference; it does not choose a default language for the model.

agentrecall feedback add --task "how to answer me" \
  --feedback "From now on, answer short and simple, add examples only if needed."
agentrecall rules explain <id>   # Type: CommunicationPreference, evidence, scope, confidence

Standing Rules

Most rules are contextual — retrieved by relevance to the task at hand. That structurally misses universal constraints ("don't leave unnecessary comments", "always run the formatter"): they share no keywords with most tasks, so they'd never clear the relevance floor. A rule carrying the AlwaysApply flag is delivered on every task instead, as must-follow guidance (or a warning, if it's a prohibition).

AlwaysApply (delivery: standing vs. contextual) and ScopeLevel (where a rule is true: Global/Language/Repository/path) are orthogonal — a standing rule is usually Global, but the two are independent properties.

A rule becomes standing when: it's a preference (always standing), the capture judge flags it as a universal style/process/quality constraint, or you keep making the same correction (the repeated-correction backstop promotes it). Standing rules show as [standing] in the Turn Memory Summary.

The standing band is capped at 5 highest-confidence rules per prompt so it stays prominent instead of becoming wallpaper; anything beyond the cap falls back to ordinary relevance ranking rather than being dropped.

Good standing rules are universal and actionable ("Run the formatter before finishing a change"). Bad ones are contextual guidance in disguise ("Use Money value objects in the billing service" — scope it to billing instead) or vague absolutes ("Never use inheritance" → prefer "favor composition over inheritance", kept contextual).

Project DNA

A single, onboarding-ready summary of a repository's engineering personality — conventions, patterns, risks, and recurring lessons — meant to get a new developer or agent productive in under five minutes. It reads the same data as the rest of AgentRecall (active/promoted rules, retrieval frequency, mined lessons, conflicts) and organizes it into fixed sections: Core Principles, Repository Conventions, Testing Patterns, Architecture Patterns, Error Handling, Feature Gates/Authorization/Security, Common Mistakes, Agent Warnings, Stale or Risky Knowledge.

Unlike search (which rule matches this task?) or report (metrics), DNA is a curated, deterministic narrative of the whole corpus — no LLM calls, no embeddings, same inputs always produce the same output.

agentrecall dna                                    # human-readable
agentrecall dna --markdown --output PROJECT_DNA.md # for onboarding docs
agentrecall dna --json                              # stable, snake_case JSON

Commit the Markdown output as PROJECT_DNA.md/CONTRIBUTING.md, or paste agentrecall dna into an agent's context at the start of a session.

Seed Packs

Optional starter engineering memories — curated rules that give an agent useful instincts before a project has accumulated its own. They're opt-in per pack, never installed automatically, and removable at any time.

agentrecall seed list                    # available packs, installed or not
agentrecall seed install tidy-first      # install as Active (default)
agentrecall seed install tidy-first --suggested  # install as Pending instead
agentrecall seed remove tidy-first       # archive the pack's rules

• Active by default, at moderate confidence (~0.65); marked with source BuiltInSeed and a [seed] marker in the Turn Memory Summary.
• Ranked below learned rules — your own repository conventions and corrections always outrank and win conflicts against seed rules, and a seed rule is never injected as must-follow. Capped at two per prompt unless the task is itself about tidying/refactoring.
• Not absolute — reject or archive a seed rule that doesn't fit; that lowers its confidence like any learned rule.
• Idempotent — installing only adds rules, never edits/deletes yours; reinstalling never duplicates or resurrects a removed rule without --force.

The built-in tidy-first pack has ten rules on separating behavior-preserving cleanup from behavior change (guard clauses, naming, extraction, scoping a tidy). It's original, paraphrased guidance — no copied book, article, or third-party text.

Career Impact Pack

The career-impact seed pack helps you notice and document promotion-worthy engineering work — impact, evidence, metrics, stakeholders, ADRs — as coaching guidance, not project facts. It installs like any other seed pack:

agentrecall seed install career-impact
agentrecall career impact --last       # last turn's candidate
agentrecall career journal --last      # promotion-ready entry, on demand
agentrecall career status              # pack/mode and the last candidate

It's low-token by design: a cheap, deterministic end-of-turn detector (no LLM, no embeddings, no network) decides whether a turn was significant; full impact/journal detail generates only on demand or when a significant candidate already exists.

• SignificantOnly by default. AgentRecall.CareerImpactMode can also be Silent (never auto-run) or Always (surface lower-confidence candidates).
• Never spams. The automatic summary is at most five bullets plus a pointer, and is human-visible only — never fed back into model context.
• Retrieval is capped, like any seed pack — ranked below learned rules.

It's original, paraphrased career-impact coaching guidance — no copied book, article, or third-party text.

Capture pipeline

Recall is deterministic through the UserPromptSubmit hook. Capture — what gets remembered — runs through a separate pipeline each time a turn finishes:

Stop hook → finalize-turn → semantic capture judge verdict → validate
  → map by confidence → store / suggest / skip / reinforce / supersede
  → structured summary

The semantic capture judge decides, not keyword heuristics. A word like "validation" or "auth" appearing in a sentence is never enough on its own to capture anything.

• Explicit save/do-not-save requests are always respected, even for narrow or stylistic rules.
• Confidence maps to outcome: ≥0.80 captures, 0.55–0.79 suggests a Pending rule, <0.55 skips.
• Duplicates are reinforced, not duplicated; an explicit supersede replaces the prior rule.
• If the judge is unavailable, automatic capture is skipped for that turn — there is no keyword fallback. The verdict is supplied by the host as a judgment object on the finalize-turn payload (AgentRecall makes no network/LLM calls itself); Claude Code's native Stop hook alone has no such field, so agentrecall devcontainer init scaffolds CLAUDE.md guidance telling the model to produce the verdict itself before the native hook fires.
• Source and outcome matter as much as wording. Documentation, tool instructions, command output, and logs are not captured merely because they were read — only when paired with an observed agent failure, a user correction, an explicit save, or a confirmed repository convention. A bare code fact is never auto-captured (it's recoverable from the repo via search). Repeated corrections raise confidence and favor capture.
• Privacy. The raw transcript is not stored by default — only a content hash, resulting rule ids, and skip reasons (StoreTurnTranscript: true to keep it for debugging).

Ask AgentRecall, don't guess. The agent should never speculate about whether something was captured — it's one command away:

agentrecall finalize-turn status      # or: agentrecall capture-status --last-turn
agentrecall activity last             # what AgentRecall did last, in general

agentrecall devcontainer init scaffolds a CLAUDE.md contract requiring the agent to check status first and only offer manual capture when nothing was captured and you explicitly ask. If an agent still says "the Stop hook may have captured it", update the tool (dotnet tool update --global AgentRecall) and re-run agentrecall devcontainer init to refresh the Stop hook and guidance.

Cleaning up old noise. For Pending rules created before source/outcome-aware capture existed, cleanup pending-noise finds and archives them (dry run by default, never touches Active/Promoted/user-edited rules):

agentrecall cleanup pending-noise            # dry run
agentrecall cleanup pending-noise --apply    # archive the noisy ones

Interactive Memory

When the capture judge is unsure (SuggestCapture), AgentRecall can ask instead of silently parking a Pending rule — but only when a terminal is attached; hooks, pipes, and MCP never block waiting for input.

🧠 AgentRecall: possible lesson detected.
[y] Remember   [n] Ignore   [v] View details

AgentRecall.InteractiveMemoryMode controls this: Auto (default — ask only for ambiguous suggestions), Ask (more conservative), Silent (never prompt; everything ambiguous becomes Pending). Approve or ignore later the normal way:

agentrecall rules list --status Pending
agentrecall rules approve <id>   # remember
agentrecall rules archive <id>   # ignore

Activity Notices

AgentRecall tells you what it's doing — what it fetched, captured, skipped, resolved — with a recognizable badge, e.g. 🧠 AgentRecall: captured 1 new rule. This is kept human-facing only, separate from the model-visible context, so notices never bloat the token budget.

Verbosity is independently configurable: ActivityNoticeLevel (Verbose/Normal/Silent, default Verbose) for CLI/status notices, and HookNoticeLevel (Normal/Silent, default Normal) for the single line the UserPromptSubmit hook injects alongside rules.

agentrecall activity last            # the latest notice
agentrecall activity list            # recent notices, newest first
agentrecall activity list --json --limit 20

Turn Memory Summary

At the end of each turn, AgentRecall prints one aggregated summary of everything it did — rules used, captured, suggested, skipped, remembered/ ignored, errors — instead of many scattered notices. It's human-visible only (never re-injected into model context) and bounded (short titles, capped item counts).

AgentRecall.TurnSummaryLevel = Silent | Compact (default) | Detailed.

agentrecall turn-summary --last             # at the configured level
agentrecall turn-summary --last --detailed  # force grouped detail
agentrecall turn-summary --last --json

Claude Code integration

Register the MCP server once:

claude mcp add agentrecall agentrecall mcp

Tool	What it does
inject_context	Given a task, return ranked/conflict-resolved rules bucketed into must-follow, suggested, warnings.
resolve_rules	Decide which of several matching rules to follow, resolving conflicts/supersessions.
compress_memory	Merge duplicate/overlapping rules (dry run by default).
get_relevant_context	Keyword-based rules to know before starting a task.
get_project_rules	Rules that always apply here (project → promoted → active).
get_reminders	A short checklist for a kind of work.
capture_status	The last turn-finalization result — the answer to "did AgentRecall capture anything?".
search_rules	Find rules relevant to a query.
suggest_feedback_candidate	Detect whether a message is a reusable correction.
capture_feedback	Save a correction in one step (pending=true to require approval).
add_feedback	Record feedback with full task/scope context.
import_pr_comments	Capture PR review comments as pending rules.

Each rule returns as trigger, rule, do, do_not, reason, applies_to, confidence, status. The server speaks JSON-RPC 2.0 over stdio, logs only to stderr, and behaves identically installed or run from source.

Registering the server only makes tools available — the agent still has to call them. Add this to your CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md to make it default behavior (or let agentrecall devcontainer init scaffold it for you):

## Memory (AgentRecall)

- **Before** coding/refactoring/reviewing/debugging, call `inject_context` with
  the task. Follow must-follow rules and heed warnings.
- **When the user corrects you**, call `suggest_feedback_candidate`, then
  `capture_feedback` for reusable lessons.
- **After a PR review**, pass comments to `import_pr_comments`.

For deterministic injection, wire a Claude Code hook instead of relying on the model to choose to call a tool — hooks run before the model responds, every time the gate matches:

{
  "hooks": {
    "UserPromptSubmit": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "PATH=$HOME/.dotnet/tools:$PATH agentrecall hook user-prompt-submit" } ] }
    ],
    "Stop": [
      { "hooks": [ { "type": "command", "command": "PATH=$HOME/.dotnet/tools:$PATH agentrecall finalize-turn --hook" } ] }
    ]
  }
}

On each prompt this gates on HookKeywords (dev-shaped prompts only, no cost otherwise), retrieves rules scoped to the repository, and prepends a compact ## AgentRecall Technical Context block (Must Follow / Warnings / Preferred Patterns / Anti Patterns / Source Rules — empty sections omitted). It never blocks Claude Code: on error it logs to stderr and injects nothing.

Troubleshoot by running the hook by hand:

echo '{"prompt":"Write Moq tests for OrderService","cwd":"'"$PWD"'"}' \
  | agentrecall hook user-prompt-submit

An empty result means the gate didn't match, the hook is disabled, or nothing was relevant. claude --debug shows hook execution inside Claude Code.

Configuration

AgentRecall reads an optional agentrecall.json from the current directory, then environment overrides prefixed AGENTRECALL_ (e.g. AGENTRECALL_AgentRecall__LogLevel=Debug). Data lives in one SQLite database under DataDirectory — backing up or moving your memory is copying that folder.

{
  "AgentRecall": {
    "DataDirectory": "~/.agentrecall",
    "LogLevel": "Information",
    "AutoApproveFeedback": true,
    "ActivityNoticeLevel": "Verbose",
    "HookNoticeLevel": "Normal",
    "TurnSummaryLevel": "Compact"
  }
}

Setting	Default	Purpose
DataDirectory	~/.agentrecall	Where the SQLite database lives.
LogLevel	Information	Log verbosity.
AutoApproveFeedback	true	false makes every capture start Pending.
ActivityNoticeLevel	Verbose	CLI activity notice verbosity: Verbose/Normal/Silent.
HookNoticeLevel	Normal	Verbosity of the single line the prompt hook injects: Normal/Silent.
TurnSummaryLevel	Compact	End-of-turn summary verbosity: Silent/Compact/Detailed.
HookEnabled	true	Master switch for the UserPromptSubmit hook.
HookKeywords	dev-task words	Words/phrases that mark a prompt as dev work.
HookMaxRules	5	Max rules injected per prompt.
HookIncludePending	true	Whether Pending rules may be injected, so a repeat can be recognized and reinforced.
HookPendingCap	1	Max Pending rules injected per prompt when HookIncludePending is true.
TurnFinalizerEnabled	true	Master switch for finalize-turn.
CaptureJudgeMode	Semantic	Off disables automatic Stop-hook capture entirely.
StoreTurnTranscript	false	Persist the raw transcript with each finalization.
MaxCandidatesPerTurn	5	Max lessons captured from one turn.
MaxCandidateCharacters	1000	Per-candidate length cap.
CaptureAutoConfidence	0.5	Minimum confidence to auto-capture without explicit acceptance.
FinalizerShowUserNotice	true	Emit a Stop-hook notice after a turn.
SuppressDuplicateNotices	true	Stay silent when only a duplicate was reinforced.
InteractiveMemoryMode	Auto	Ask/Silent change whether ambiguous captures prompt you.
CareerImpactMode	SignificantOnly	Silent/Always for the career-impact pack's auto-summary.
CareerImpactSummaryLevel	Compact	Detailed for the career-impact auto-summary.

Development

git clone https://github.com/AkbarDizaji/AgentRecall.git
cd AgentRecall
dotnet build && dotnet test
dotnet run --project src/AgentRecall.Cli -- init   # run without installing

See ARCHITECTURE.md for solution layout and design, and CONTRIBUTING.md for the contribution workflow, coding conventions, and how to cut a release.