Philosophy

Wiki as substrate

Karpathy argues that a personal wiki — verbatim quotes, paraphrase, cross-links — is the durable substrate of long-term thinking. Apps come and go; markdown with provenance stays readable for decades.

amem treats the wiki as the product, not a byproduct. Capture is just staging; compile is the commitment.

Offline-first, always

Cloud dependencies are a liability. amem runs entirely on a user’s Mac: Ollama for LLM, pdftotext for PDF parsing, local disk for storage. The only network calls fetch papers from their canonical URLs.

This matters for three reasons:

1. Sovereignty — your knowledge base doesn’t evaporate when a vendor pivots
2. Speed — local I/O beats round-trips
3. Reproducibility — SHA-256 provenance only means something if the source sits next to the hash

Dual audience

MCP for agents, CLI + extension for humans — same store, one source of truth. If an agent cites a chunk, a human can read that exact chunk by grep-ing ~/.amem/wiki/.

Complement, don’t compete

aide orchestrates agents. amem gives them memory. Neither duplicates the other. [sync.memory] method = "amem" in an aide.toml is the contract.

No legacy

amem is a clean v1 rewrite of crossmem. No code was ported verbatim; every module was reconsidered against these principles. crossmem remains published as v0 for historical continuity.