Link

Local memory for AI agents.

Link gives Codex, Claude, Cursor, Kiro, VS Code, Copilot, Antigravity, and other local agents the same source-backed memory, stored locally as Markdown.

Website · How it works · Memory · Tools & CLI · Setup · Docs · MCP Registry · PyPI · Homebrew

What Is Link?

Link is an open-source memory layer for local AI agents. Raw sources become an inspectable Markdown wiki. Explicit "remember this" requests become reviewable memories. Agents retrieve compact, source-backed context through the CLI, MCP, official skills, or the local viewer without dumping the whole wiki into a chat window.

The wiki is the storage layer. The product is durable memory that stays on your machine, remains readable in plain files, and can be shared across multiple agents instead of locked inside one vendor profile.

Ask in your own words; Link matches by meaning, not keywords. All local, all plain files.

How It Works

Link gives agents four simple moves:

1. Capture notes, transcripts, docs, screenshots, and project context in raw/.
2. Structure source-backed pages under wiki/.
3. Remember explicit preferences, decisions, facts, and project context as reviewable memory.
4. Retrieve compact query packets through the CLI, MCP, official skills, or the local web viewer.

Most agent sessions start from zero. You re-explain preferences, repo decisions, project constraints, and why something matters. Link turns that repeated context into local memory agents can query.

Link follows Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern: keep knowledge outside the chat window, make claims inspectable, and let context compound over time.

Why Link Is Different

Every other agent-memory system stores memory as embeddings in a vector database or as an LLM-extracted graph. Link made four architectural commitments those designs cannot bolt on:

1. Memory you can read. Every memory is a plain Markdown file — open it, grep it, git-diff it. If Link disappeared tomorrow, your memory is still yours.
2. Review-gated writes. Agents propose; you approve. Even the automatic session hooks capture proposals, never facts.
3. No LLM in the memory layer. Ingestion and recall are deterministic — nothing can hallucinate a fact into your memory, because there is no model in the write path.
4. Provably local. CI blocks outbound network code in the runtime, and the optional semantic models load offline-only after one explicit setup.

And the claims are measured, not asserted — see the benchmarks below. Named comparisons against Mem0/OpenMemory, Zep/Graphiti, and Letta: Why Link?

Benchmarks

Plain files with no LLM in the memory layer, measured against the systems that have one everywhere:

Every number ships with its config, judge model, caveats, and the experiments that lost — including LongMemEval end-to-end, where we re-judged both sides under the neutral Hunyuan 3 referee: mem0's GPT-5 answers score 91.0%, Link's budget-model answers 80.6%. Their published number holds up, and the gap tracks the answering model, not the memory layer — that's what the 99.4% evidence-retrieval row above isolates. Full methodology and reproduction steps: benchmarks/RESULTS.md.

Memory You Can Take Anywhere — And Prove Is Working

Three questions every memory system should answer, and how Link answers them with mechanisms instead of promises:

"Is it on all my machines?" lnk sync moves reviewed memory through a git remote you control — a private GitHub repo, a homelab bare repo — with no server and no account. Secrets are scanned before anything leaves, conflicts become review items instead of git markers, and private captures never sync. lnk team-sync runs a shared team brain on the same rails.

"What did I believe back then?" Ask in plain language: lnk recall "where does local data live in March" returns what was true then, reconstructed from the dated files and their supersede lineage — while the same question without the date returns today's truth. Deterministic: a regex and a calendar, no model. Point-in-time accuracy from plain language: 0.917, identical to asking with an ISO date.

"Is my agent actually using this?" The question most memory systems cannot answer about themselves. Link records retrievals locally — session briefs pushed to agents, recalls they chose to make — and lnk wins answers with counts, while lnk digest reports the weekly story including memories that have never been retrieved. The ledger stores which memory was read and when, never what you asked; it never syncs, and LINK_USAGE=off disables it. And memory reaches every agent, not just the hooked ones: the first MCP tool response of a session carries the brief, whatever tool was called.

Quick Start

Two commands: see it work, then make it yours.