easymem

easymem

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A local wiki for your codebase, served as an MCP server. No API key, no cloud, no second model.

The coding agent you already run — Claude Code, Codex, opencode — writes the pages. easymem keeps them, indexes them, and links them.

Why

Most "knowledge base" tools want their own model key. That means a second bill, a second config file, and a second model that is often weaker than the agent asking the question.

easymem has no model inside it. The agent on the other end of the MCP pipe is the model. It reads your files, decides what a page should say, and calls wiki_write. easymem does the parts a model is bad at: full-text search, a link graph, and knowing which source files changed since last time.

It also has no native modules — three pure-JavaScript dependencies, nothing to compile. npx either works or your network is down.

Install

Add one block to your agent's MCP config. There is nothing else to set up.

Claude Code — .mcp.json in the project root:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "easymem": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "easymem"] }
  }
}

Codex — ~/.codex/config.toml:

[mcp_servers.easymem]
command = "npx"
args = ["-y", "easymem"]

opencode — opencode.json:

{
  "mcp": {
    "easymem": { "type": "local", "command": ["npx", "-y", "easymem"], "enabled": true }
  }
}

Pages land in .easymem/wiki/ next to your code. Point somewhere else with --dir <path> or EASYMEM_DIR.

Use

Just ask. The agent picks the tools by itself:

Read everything under docs/ and build the wiki.

What do we already know about the checkout flow?

The first run walks the files and writes pages. Later runs only touch what changed — easymem hashes each source file, so unchanged files cost nothing.

Tools

Tool	What it does
wiki_search	Full-text search, then follows [[links]] so related pages surface too
wiki_read	Read one page
wiki_list	Every page: id, title, type, path
wiki_graph	The whole link graph — find hubs and orphans
wiki_guide	The writing rules, handed to the agent at run time
wiki_pending	Which source files are new or changed since last time
wiki_write	Write one page
wiki_delete	Delete one page
wiki_reindex	Rebuild the index, the graph and index.md

wiki_guide is why the wiki comes out the same shape in every client: the writing rules ride in a tool result, not in a config file each tool spells differently. The package does ship a SKILL.md, and it is deliberately thin — it says when to reach for the wiki and hands the how straight back to wiki_guide.

What is on disk

.easymem/
├── wiki/                     markdown pages — commit these
│   ├── index.md              regenerated on every reindex
│   ├── entities/             one concrete thing: a service, a table, a role
│   ├── concepts/             an idea across things: a flow, a policy
│   ├── sources/              one page per source document
│   ├── comparisons/          X versus Y
│   └── synthesis/            a conclusion drawn from several pages
└── .state/
    ├── sources.json          which source files are done, by content hash
    └── wiki-sources.json     scan bookkeeping

That is everything. There is no database.

The search index and the link graph are built in memory from the markdown when the server starts, and rebuilt on wiki_reindex. Nothing is cached, because nothing needs to be: the pages are the source of truth, and rebuilding is about 120 ms for 1,000 pages, 230 ms for 5,000. Queries run in single-digit milliseconds.

Nothing outside wiki/ is a source of truth. .state/ holds the content hashes that let wiki_pending skip files it has already done — the one fact you cannot derive from the pages — plus a little scan bookkeeping. Delete .state/ and the next run re-reads every source; nothing is lost but time.

Pages are plain markdown with YAML frontmatter. Nothing is locked in — delete easymem and you still have a folder of readable notes.

Add to .gitignore:

.easymem/.state/

Development

pnpm install
pnpm dev            # run the MCP server over stdio, straight from src
pnpm lint
pnpm test           # jest, unit tests with coverage
pnpm build          # tsc → dist/; dist/cli.js is the published binary
pnpm ci             # build + typecheck + test, the same thing CI runs

Requires Node 20 or newer.

Where this comes from

The idea is Andrej Karpathy's LLM wiki: stop running RAG over raw sources on every question. Have the agent compile what it reads into a wiki of markdown pages, then answer from the wiki.

I ran that pattern in my own knowledge base, brain, for a long time. It works. It just does not work well. With nothing but a prompt describing the job, the agent writes each page in whatever shape it feels like that day — and a wiki where every page is shaped differently is a pile, not a wiki.

Then I found TencentDB-Agent-Memory. It is the same LLM-wiki idea, but with real constraints around it: a fixed page format, an actual tokenizer, a link graph. With the constraints in place the results got a lot better.

It is also heavy — an LLM client, an HTTP API, a control panel, multi-tenant storage, a SQLite index. Sometimes you just want a small wiki to help the agent you already have. So easymem lifts out the MemoryKnowledge engine — the mixed Chinese/English tokenizer, the multi-hop graph search, the page format — and puts it behind an MCP interface. Nothing else.

MIT. TencentDB-Agent-Memory is MIT too.