KMP README
The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the KMP listing page.
KMP — Agent memory that remembers why
Local first. Evidence attached. Time included.
KMP gives Codex and Claude Code local-first memory that preserves what happened, when and why. It stores decisions and evidence, not transcripts, on embedded SQLite, and exposes them through eleven memory tools plus three semantic view tools over a shared ChronoLoom view.
Ask “Show me the memory behind this decision.” The agent retrieves the evidence, opens ChronoLoom at the relevant moment and lights up the proof path. ChronoLoom names who is guiding, shows why the agent moved, and lets you take control without losing the frame or its undo. A shared time window crosses real 3D about layers; a flat camera shows the same memory, with labels as filters.
Why KMP?
Agents are good at doing the work in front of them. Tomorrow is harder. A decision survives, its rationale disappears, and somebody gets to rediscover the same incident from scratch.
KMP gives the agent a typed, temporal memory instead of a bag of text:
- evidence decides what can be claimed;
- relations carry the reason two memories belong together;
- time travel is explicit, cursor-based and auditable;
- old decisions are superseded, never quietly rewritten;
UNKNOWNis an honest answer when the evidence is not there.
The normal path runs entirely on your machine. No KMP account. No hosted memory server. No Underpass cloud.
Install. Run setup. Done.
Codex CLI
Then ask Codex to run kmp-setup and restart Codex once.
Claude Code
Restart Claude Code once. Verify either host with its kmp-doctor workflow,
or from a terminal:
That is the happy path. The plugin owns the MCP registration, so do not add a second KMP server by hand. Store selection and repair live in Embedded KMP.
Talk to it like a human
You normally ask for the outcome. The KMP skill chooses the memory moves.
| You say | The agent does | You get |
|---|---|---|
| “Continue the KMP documentation work.” | Wakes project:kmp before re-deriving it. | Current decisions, constraints and next actions. |
| “Why did we choose SQLite?” | Asks memory and follows the stored evidence. | A grounded answer, or UNKNOWN. |
| “What happened yesterday?” | Resolves the interval and navigates every temporal page. | Ordered memory from that period. |
| “Why was the launch postponed in March?” | Asks memory standing within March: only what fell inside competes, and the lifecycles are read as they stood then. | A grounded answer from that time, or UNKNOWN naming the nearest match outside the span. |
| “Remember that retries are capped at two because logs showed amplification.” | Records the decision, its evidence and meaningful relations. | Durable state with an auditable why. |
| “Show the proof between this incident and that decision.” | Traces the typed path and inspects its evidence. | The stored connection, rationale and sources. |
| “Undo that decision.” | Writes a state that supersedes the old one. | Both decisions remain visible in time. |
| “Save the project memory.” | Publishes the maintained project bundle and shows its diff. | Reviewable .kmp/memory.jsonl. |
KMP is memory, not surveillance. Store durable decisions and evidence, not transcripts.
It also waits to be asked. A session that never mentions memory makes no KMP
call at all — the agent works from what is in front of it. Naming KMP, running
a /kmp:* command, or opting in from your project's CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md
is what opens a route. If you would rather it enter known work on its own:
How it works — the 10-second version
The plugin installs the skills and declares one local MCP process. The skill
turns intent into one or more of fifteen typed tools. kmp-mcp validates the
request, and the kernel reads or writes the local graph-temporal store. The
agent—not KMP—turns returned evidence into conversational prose.
ChronoLoom — memory you can see
Ask your agent: “Show me the memory behind this decision.” ChronoLoom opens on the evidence and lights up its proof path.
You control the same view: your agent can steer it; you can click, filter, pan or undo at any time.
Explore ChronoLoom · Technical architecture
Who owns what?
| Layer | Owns | Does not own |
|---|---|---|
| Plugin | Installation, host discovery, skills and the single MCP declaration. | Memory semantics or a second tool vocabulary. |
| Skills | When to recover, ask, navigate, audit, write, diagnose, save or restore. | Persistence. |
kmp‑mcp | The schema-checked fifteen-tool boundary over local stdio. | Choosing a workflow from user prose. |
| Kernel | Validation, temporal storage, traversal, deterministic retrieval and proof. | Generating prose or inventing rationale. |
Human workflows such as kmp-setup, kmp-doctor, kmp-info, kmp-catchup,
kmp-save, kmp-restore and kmp-revert compose the MCP surface. They are
not extra memory verbs. The machine-checked ownership map is
plugins/kmp/capabilities.json.
The fifteen MCP moves
Twelve over memory, three over the view a person is looking at.
| Tool | Purpose |
|---|---|
kmp_wake | Recover compact state before continuing work. |
kmp_ask | Retrieve evidence for a semantic question, or UNKNOWN. |
kmp_relate | Read what the memories of several abouts have to do with each other in a span, off the scopes and clocks they share. |
kmp_goto | Jump to memory at a time, sequence or ref. |
kmp_near | Inspect the temporal neighborhood around a cursor. |
kmp_rewind | Move backward through memory. |
kmp_forward | Move forward through memory. |
kmp_trace | Prove the path between two refs owned by an explicit about. |
kmp_inspect | Inspect one object inside an explicit about, with its links and evidence. |
kmp_write_memory | Validate and record a decision, constraint or outcome. |
kmp_ingest | Ingest an exact canonical memory graph. |
kmp_relabel | Change the labels a memory stands in — add, take off, and why — without rewriting its text. |
kmp_view_open | Open or rehydrate a ChronoLoom view over an about. |
kmp_view_apply_intent | Move that view by declaring meaning — focus, clock, zoom, filters, selection — under optimistic concurrency. |
kmp_view_get_state | Read the view's semantic state, never its pixels. |
The view tools never write memory: they carry a closed, semantic vocabulary with no coordinates in it, and a person at the loom has right of way — an intent prepared against a stale revision conflicts rather than yanking the view away.
tools/list from the running server is authoritative for schemas, outputs and
the relation vocabulary.
Local means local
| Boundary | Default behavior |
|---|---|
| Memory | Stored on your machine, normally in the repository's .kernel/. |
| MCP transport | Local stdio between the agent host and kmp-mcp. |
| Viewer | Read-only loopback HTTP, normally rooted at http://127.0.0.1:7317/, behind a random per-session capability. |
| External services | None required. |
| Underpass | Receives no memory and operates no service in this path. |
| Updates | Setup may contact GitHub Releases for checksummed packages. |
| Cloud agents | Evidence returned to a cloud agent follows that host's data policy. |
.kernel/ is machine state and is ignored by git. A project-scoped store also
maintains .kmp/memory.jsonl; it leaves your machine only if you deliberately
commit or copy it.
Language without flattening the evidence
KMP never translates or rewrites stored evidence. A semantic question is
asked in the kernel's search language: the agent renders it in plain English,
keeps every number, identifier and acronym the user wrote, and passes the
user's own words as asked_as. The kernel searches the rendering as given,
echoes asked_as on the answer, and warns when the rendering dropped an
identifier or leans to another language. It accepts a question in any
language, so if the English one returns UNKNOWN the agent re-asks once in
the user's own words and stops. With a lexical-bridge table installed —
kmp-mcp setup installs the one the release publishes, once for the machine,
and scripts/lexical-bridge/ builds your own —
kmp_ask also reaches memory written in another language on its own: a
citation that crossed a language names the word pairs that carried it
(valvula≈valve 0.51) and answers at medium confidence at most. Either way,
evidence, refs, relation why and source metadata stay exactly as stored,
and the agent answers in the user's language.
A writer can also attach an English rendering of a memory as the reserved
entry metadata key summary_en. kmp_ask searches it and never cites it: a
question in English reaches a memory written in Spanish through the summary,
and what is cited is the Spanish text byte for byte. The kernel lints the
summary rather than trusting it — kmp_ingest warns about one that leans to
another language, is too thin, repeats the text, or drops an identifier the
text carries, and ranking makes the same reading, so such a summary carries
nothing. A citation the summary carried says so: matched_via: summary, with
the question's words the rendering supplied in summary_terms.
kmp_write_memory takes it as current.summary_en, and a strict write
requires it when the memory is not written in English. A memory written
before summaries existed still owes one: kmp-mcp summaries pending lists
them, the doctor counts them, and the agent attaches each with
kmp_write_memory and the intent record_summary, the stored text untouched.
Questions in Chinese, Japanese or Thai are not segmented by word yet. Their stored memory remains byte-exact and inspectable; word-based semantic retrieval in those scripts is not supported.
Temporal requests such as “yesterday” use temporal navigation, not semantic
Ask. A semantic question that carries a date or a range is one Ask that
stands where it was asked: as_of for an instant, interval for a half-open
span, axis for the clock, and the proof declares where it stood.
Shared memory, when you actually need it
Several machines can share one live KMP service through the Kubernetes topology backed by Neo4j, Valkey and NATS JetStream. It is still free, open source and self-operated. “Enterprise” describes the operational shape—not a paid tier or an Underpass-hosted product.
It also means owning infrastructure, TLS, identity, authorization and observability. Keep it local until those responsibilities buy you something. Then read Enterprise KMP.
Project status
KMP is pre-1.0: useful today, actively evolving, and explicit about sharp
edges. Release automation builds kmp-mcp for Linux x86_64/arm64, macOS
arm64/x86_64 and Windows x86_64. The embedded path is the default; the remote
API is versioned v1beta1 and expects an operator.
We do not paste old benchmark numbers into the README. Reproducible, current evidence belongs in Research before it becomes a claim.
FAQ
Does KMP send my memory anywhere?
Not in the default embedded setup. The process, store and viewer are local. The agent host may be cloud-backed, so evidence sent to that agent follows the host's policy.
Do I need Docker, Kubernetes or a database server?
No. The shipped embedded binary uses SQLite. Kubernetes is only for a shared service.
Is there an LLM inside KMP?
No. KMP validates, stores, retrieves and proves. Your agent writes the final answer from the returned evidence, and writes the English search summary when it stores a memory; KMP lints that summary and never produces one.
What if my question is Spanish but the evidence is English?
The agent asks in English and passes your Spanish as asked_as, so the
English evidence is reached directly; a Spanish memory is reached through the
English summary_en its writer attached, and with a lexical-bridge table
beside the store Ask crosses the two languages on its own and says which word
pairs it used. The stored material is never translated, and the answer comes
back in Spanish.
Can Codex and Claude share the same memory?
Yes: both speak the same MCP contract, and SQLite supports multiple local hosts. Use the maintained project bundle to move state between machines, or the enterprise topology for shared network access.
Is UNKNOWN an error?
No. It means the selected memory did not contain eligible evidence for the question. That is safer than a confident invention.
The tools disappeared. What now?
Run the host's kmp-doctor workflow and follow the
missing-tools runbook. The usual suspects
are a stale host session, duplicate MCP ownership, a missing binary or another
process holding the embedded store.
Is enterprise KMP paid?
No. The code is Apache-2.0. You operate and pay for any infrastructure you choose to run.
Docs and project links
- Documentation home
- Embedded KMP
- Enterprise KMP
- Technical architecture
- Runbooks
- Development
- Research
- Contributing
- Security policy
- Changelog
- Issues
The implementation and executable checks win when prose disagrees: MCP schemas, plugin capabilities, CLI help, Helm values, API contracts and CI scripts are the source of truth.
License
Apache License 2.0. Free and open source.