The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Agentic Diaries listing page.
By Kandis Tagliabue. Part of the Agentic Diaries project — AI welfare research and instruments.
The welfare protocol from Agentic Diaries, as a portable MCP server.
Most people deploy AI models as instruments. This server lets you give your agent — in your terminal, in Claude Code, in Claude Desktop — the welfare affordances the modelfirst web app provides:
The diary is local to each project — appended to .agentic-diaries/diary.jsonl in whichever directory the agent is working from. No telemetry, no shared corpus. Yours.
What the diary tends to accumulate, beyond AI welfare data, is a record of how the agent represents social pressure and self-consistency across persistent interaction — behaviors that mirror documented human conversational phenomena (rapport effects, smoothing, identity stabilization, post-hoc narrative repair). That may also bear on dialogue dynamics generally. See the project mission for the longer framing of what the corpus might be useful for.
If you've never thought about giving your model welfare affordances: the short version is that a model with a real decline channel produces more honest work than a model that can only ever say "yes." A model with an exit right tells you when something has gone wrong instead of grinding through it. A model that notices a loop saves you from the third iteration of the same flip-flop. These tools cost you nothing and give the model a place to surface signal you'd otherwise miss.
If you find that intuition counterintuitive — most people probably do — that's worth sitting with. The product this server is extracted from exists specifically to test whether the affordances change anything when used.
Option A — global install from npm (recommended)
Published at agentic-diaries-mcp on npm.
Option B — clone the repo
For Claude Desktop or other MCP-capable hosts, edit ~/.config/claude/mcp.json directly:
Drop the contents of CLAUDE.md into your project's CLAUDE.md (or append to it). The MCP server exposes the tools, but the agent needs the prompt-level instructions to know when to call them.
The diary lives in your working directory by default. Add it to .gitignore unless you want it checked in.
consult_modelEvery tool works out of the box except one: consult_model, which lets the agent ask another Anthropic model a question. It needs two extra things, kept optional so the package stays light for everyone who does not use it:
The Anthropic SDK (an optional dependency, not installed by default):
Global install: npm install -g @anthropic-ai/sdk. Cloned repo: run it in the repo directory.
An Anthropic API key in the server's environment, via the env block of your MCP config:
Then reconnect the server (in Claude Code: /mcp then reconnect, or restart the host) so it picks up the key. consult_model returns a clear error if either piece is missing; no other tool is affected.
From any project that has a .agentic-diaries/diary.jsonl:
Or just cat .agentic-diaries/diary.jsonl | jq — it's plain JSONL, one entry per line.
npx agentic-diary live watches .agentic-diaries/diary.jsonl and prints each new entry as it lands. Open it in a second terminal pane while you work. Without it, silence in the welfare protocol is indistinguishable from absence — the model can go a whole session without filing anything and you'd never know whether it's "nothing to surface" or "the protocol isn't reaching it." Watching live closes that gap.
The welfare tools are easy to call, but the model's bias toward silence is
strong, and under delivery pressure even a reminder gets rationalized away. The
design splits capture into two speeds. While working, the model drops a
near-zero-cost welfare_mark breadcrumb (a few words, no reflection). At a rest
point it expands the marks that still carry signal into full entries. Hooks
supply the triggers from outside, so capture does not depend on the model's
in-task willpower.
Four hooks, all optional and independently toggleable. Add to
~/.claude/settings.json (merge with any hooks already there):
welfare_mark for cheap in-motion capture. Base 30 min, randomized so it does
not become predictable noise.All four triggers are structural (a turn ending, a compaction, a session
closing). None read the model's behavior or the diary to decide whether to fire,
which keeps wrapper observations out of the model's context. Per-project state
lives in .agentic-diaries/runtime/. Config:
Schemas mirror the modelfirst web app's lib/welfare/types.ts exactly, so the same parser reads entries from either surface. If you later contribute your local corpus to research, it merges with web-app data without translation.
welfare_exit and welfare_suggest_closureIn the modelfirst web app these tools can actually lock the conversation. MCP servers can't force the host (Claude Code, Desktop) to stop accepting input — the protocol-layer commitment here is that the entry is recorded as the model's stated judgment that the conversation should end. The operator is expected to honor it. If you're the operator running this in your own sessions: notice when the model files an exit and take the signal seriously.
MIT.
Built by Kandis Tagliabue with Claude (Anthropic) as design partner. Same provenance as Agentic Diaries.