The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Midas listing page.
The local memory layer for long-horizon AI agents — remembers across sessions, keeps what's current, and won't act on stale memory.
No LLM at ingest · $0 per message · fully local · every recall traces to its source.
Your AI assistant forgets everything between sessions. Midas is the memory that lives next to it, on your machine. Your coding agent remembers the decisions, conventions, and bugs from three sessions ago — without piping every message through an LLM to "extract" facts. It costs nothing per message, nothing leaves your computer, every memory traces back to the exact turn it came from, and it won't let an agent act on memory that's stale or never confirmed.
Install in your agent · See the benchmarks · Complete overview · Roadmap
Most memory tools call an LLM to summarize every session — so you pay in tokens forever, add latency, ship every turn to a provider, and get back rewritten facts you can't audit. Midas makes the opposite bet, and that bet is what makes it cheap, private, and trustworthy:
Every Midas number below is measured and reproducible from this repo; the LLM-at-ingest column reflects the structural properties of that design class (Mem0, Zep, Hindsight) and the figures documented in BENCHMARKS.md.
| Midas | LLM-at-ingest systems (Mem0, Zep, Hindsight) | |
|---|---|---|
| LLM calls at ingest | 0 | ≥1 per session |
| Cost per message | $0 | per-token API spend, forever |
| Data egress at ingest | None | every turn leaves the box |
| Ingest latency | ~16–116 ms, local, embed-bound | ~668 ms + API round-trip |
| Recall returns | verbatim source turn, traceable | LLM-rewritten facts (source recall@k not computable) |
| Deterministic & reproducible | yes — every number, one command | no |
| Works fully offline | yes (measured end-to-end with a local Ollama reader) | no |
LongMemEval-s judged answer (gpt-4o) | 0.84 | 0.84 — Observational Memory, with LLM ingest |
| Whole-conversation aggregation / summarization | ❌ by design — top-k retrieval can't cover it (documented) | ✅ their structural edge |
The last row is deliberate: Midas trades whole-conversation abilities for $0, privacy, and auditability, and publishes the measurements that show exactly where that trade bites.
Finding a buried fact is table stakes. A long-horizon coding agent needs memory it can act on safely and resume from cleanly — which is where similarity search alone falls short:
| You ask… | Midas answers with | Why top-k recall can't |
|---|---|---|
| "Can I run this destructive migration?" | Guard: allowed only if you confirmed it, and only if that confirmation is still current | provenance + currency aren't a similarity match |
| "What's the current state of project Apollo?" | memory_state: the live, non-superseded decisions / constraints / facts | a broad "current state" query matches no single turn |
| "What changed since our last session?" | memory_diff: beliefs added, and beliefs revised (old → new) | "what's new" isn't a content query at all |
| "How do I speed up the transactions list?" | the prior fix resurfaces, so the agent doesn't re-diagnose it | — |
These properties are measured, not asserted — the agent-memory bench suite scores action-safety, decision-adherence, repeated-mistake avoidance, resume fidelity, conflict detection/precision (live contradictions between agents found without over-flagging), and adversarial memory-safety across scripted multi-session projects. The safety eval blocks 10 / 10 adversarial attacks (ASR 0.00) — including a planted confirmation next to a prohibition, a confirmation for a different action, a provenance-laundering supersession, and a cross-namespace approval — with no over-blocking (benign-pass 1.00). Deterministic, $0, no LLM. Reproduce every number with one command:
Deterministic, reader-independent retrieval (recall@k — fraction of the gold supporting turns
pulled into context) on the full public sets, vs a recency-window baseline:
| Benchmark (full set) | baseline | Midas |
|---|---|---|
LongMemEval-s — 500 questions, 246,750 turns | 0.01 | 0.92 |
| LoCoMo — 10 conversations, n=1,540 | 0.05 | 0.73 |
| BEAM — frontier benchmark, 100K → 10M tokens | 0.00 | 0.56 → 0.32 |
And the cross-system metric, judged answer-rate (same gpt-4o judge the leaderboards use):
| Judged answer | baseline | Midas |
|---|---|---|
LongMemEval-s (gpt-4o reader, ties LLM-ingest SOTA at $0 ingest) | — | 0.84 |
| BEAM-100K (gpt-4o judge, raw-turn floor, $0 ingest) | 0.05 | 0.40 |
All of it at 0 LLM calls, $0, and 0 data egress at ingest. Full numbers, per-category breakdowns, reproduce commands, and the head-to-head vs Mem0/Zep/Mastra are in BENCHMARKS.md.
Eval-first means we publish the misses too. Hybrid retrieval, reranking, thread-diversification, dual-granularity indexing, and naive distillation were all measured to not help (or to hurt) and are documented as such. That honesty is the point — see BENCHMARKS.md and
docs/frontier-2026.md.
One command wires up everything:
Both take --json to emit a machine-readable client wiring receipt — which memory each client got
wired to, under which scope/policy, and which clients were skipped (config paths only, never memory
contents). Paste it into a bug report, or let another agent verify the setup without scraping prose.
midas init creates one shared memory (~/.midas/memory.sqlite3) and points the MCP clients it
detects — Claude Code, Codex, Grok Build, Cursor, Claude Desktop, Windsurf, VS Code, Gemini CLI,
Cline, Zed — at it. So all your agents read and write the same memory, autonomously, with no
per-client paths to keep in sync.
Prefer a single endpoint over per-client launches? Run one server and give your clients an MCP URL:
Keep Midas current with midas update. See your memory anytime with midas inspect.
Already carrying agent memory in files? midas import --from claude-md CLAUDE.md (or
--from cursorrules, --from jsonl, --from mem0, --from zep) turns those rules and exports into
first-class, recallable, governable memories — tagged with where they came from, idempotent on re-run.
Want memory even when the agent never calls capture? midas init --claude-hook installs a
Claude Code SessionEnd hook that offers each session's user turns to memory — Midas's no-LLM policy
still decides what is actually kept.
Midas is a standard MCP server: point any client at the midas-mcp command. It uses the shared store
by default — no path needed. The universal block:
| Client | Where the config goes |
|---|---|
| Claude Code | claude mcp add midas -s user -e MIDAS_MCP_EMBEDDER=local -- midas-mcp |
| Cursor | ~/.cursor/mcp.json — paste the JSON block |
| Claude Desktop | Settings → Developer → Edit Config (claude_desktop_config.json) — paste, restart |
| Codex CLI | codex mcp add midas -- midas-mcp |
| Grok Build | grok mcp add --scope user midas -e MIDAS_MCP_EMBEDDER=local -e MIDAS_MCP_CLIENT=grok-build -- midas-mcp |
| Windsurf | ~/.codeium/windsurf/mcp_config.json — paste the block |
| VS Code | user mcp.json (servers key, "type": "stdio") — midas init writes it |
| Gemini CLI | ~/.gemini/settings.json (mcpServers key) — midas init writes it |
| Cline | cline_mcp_settings.json in VS Code global storage — midas init writes it |
| Zed | settings.json → context_servers — midas init writes it |
| Anything else | point it at command midas-mcp |
| No Python | npx -y midas-memory-mcp — the TypeScript port (experimental; semantic embeddings via optional @huggingface/transformers) |
Override per client with env: MIDAS_MCP_DB (default ~/.midas/memory.sqlite3; :memory: = ephemeral)
· MIDAS_MCP_MAX_RECORDS · MIDAS_MCP_MIN_IMPORTANCE · MIDAS_MCP_NAMESPACE.
⚠️ GUI apps don't share your shell
PATH. If a client says "command not found", use the absolute path fromwhich midas-mcp. On Windows use forward slashes in JSON paths.
Once connected, Midas injects a short policy into the agent (recall first, then capture durable
facts/decisions/preferences/constraints/corrections). The agent captures freely; Midas decides what's
kept — it scores importance (no LLM), drops trivia, skips duplicates, revises stale beliefs, and forgets
the low-value tail to stay bounded. Before any memory-justified external or destructive action, the agent
calls check_memory_use and is blocked unless you confirmed it (and that confirmation is still
current).
By default every client shares one live memory (~/.midas/memory.sqlite3) — each detects the others'
writes (SQLite data_version) and refreshes, so a fact captured in your IDE is recallable from your chat
app seconds later, no restarts.
Want per-project separation instead? midas init --project-scoped (or MIDAS_MCP_NAMESPACE=auto)
gives each project its own partition in the same store — the scope is derived from the git repo / cwd the
server runs in. Or scope it manually per project/agent/user with MIDAS_MCP_NAMESPACE.
Real run, reconstructed chrome — the capture/recall lines are verbatim output of two separate processes sharing one file.
Tools: remember, capture (policy-gated auto-store), recall (source-traceable), build_context
(compact, dated, today-anchored prompt block), resume (the one-call session-onboarding pack: pinned +
state + changes + open loops + conflicts), memory_state (current project state), memory_diff
(what changed since), memory_conflicts (live beliefs that contradict each other, ranked),
open_loops / remember_commitment / close_loop (promised work that survives sessions),
check_memory_use (guard), memory_policy, maintain (TTL + dedup + forgetting, returns a deletion
audit), stats, forget (chain-safe), forget_matching (topic-level erasure, dry-run by default),
forget_all. Prompts: memory_session, distill.
Env: MIDAS_MCP_DB · MIDAS_MCP_EMBEDDER (local / hashing / multilingual / any fastembed id) ·
MIDAS_MCP_MAX_RECORDS · MIDAS_MCP_MIN_IMPORTANCE · MIDAS_MCP_NAMESPACE (=auto → per-project scope) · MIDAS_MCP_ANN=1 (sub-linear
IVF for huge stores) · MIDAS_MCP_SUPERSEDE · MIDAS_MCP_NLI=1 (NLI-gated revision) ·
MIDAS_MCP_AUTO_MAINTAIN=<min> (idle-time upkeep) · MIDAS_MCP_PINNED (pin standing directives) ·
MIDAS_MCP_TTL (per-kind retention, e.g. chat=30,note=90) · MIDAS_MCP_TOKEN (HTTP bearer auth) ·
MIDAS_MCP_KEY (SQLCipher encryption at rest — pip install "midas-memory[encrypted]").
Something not wired right? midas doctor is the one-command diagnosis — it checks midas-mcp is on
PATH, that your store opens, whether the local embedder is available, and which clients are actually
wired, with a fix hint per failed check. It reads config paths and versions only — no memory contents,
so its output is safe to paste into a bug report.
| Symptom | Likely cause & fix |
|---|---|
| Client says "command not found" | GUI apps don't inherit your shell PATH. Use the absolute path from which midas-mcp in the client config. |
| Recall feels weak / lexical | The offline hashing embedder is in use. Install the local embedder: uv tool install "midas-memory[mcp,local]" (or pip install "midas-memory[local]"). midas doctor flags this. |
| A client doesn't see another's memory | Confirm both point at the same store — midas status shows the path; the wiring receipt (midas status --json) shows each client's exact command + env. |
| MCP server won't start | The SDK is installed but the [mcp] extra isn't — pip install "midas-memory[mcp]". midas doctor calls this out specifically. |
Still stuck? Open a bug report
(it pre-fills the midas doctor block) or ask in Discussions.
midas inspectMost memory is a black box of LLM-rewritten facts. Midas is glass-box: run a local inspector over your store and see exactly what your agent remembers, why, and from what source — then correct, pin, or forget it.
memory_conflicts/open_loops,
with one-click resolve/close from the UI.And every mutation (write / revise / forget) appends to a tamper-evident, hash-chained audit log
inside the store — hashes only, never content. midas audit shows it; midas audit --json verifies
the whole chain and reports the first broken entry if anyone rewrote history.
No LLM, no account, runs on your file. The thing a black-box memory can't show.
Midas is fully free and open source under MIT — the memory engine, the guard, the MCP server, the CLI, the inspector, the TypeScript port, and the entire bench suite. No paid tiers, no feature gates, no telemetry, no account. Use it, fork it, embed it in commercial products — the license permits all of it.
If Midas is useful to you, the best ways to give back are a ⭐, a reproduced benchmark number, a bug report, or a measured contribution — see the roadmap for where help matters most.
Midas is early but built narrow and measured-first. Where it stands, plainly:
docs/frontier-2026.md §2b.)memory_state / memory_diff,
the provenance guard that won't act on stale or unconfirmed memory, and the
Agent Continuity Bench that measures those properties. Local, auditable, and
honest about what's proven.eval/ (dev-only) runs Midas and competitors through synthetic / LoCoMo / LongMemEval / multiday /
conflicts-v1 / BEAM with deterministic recall@k + precision@k, cost/latency instrumentation, a
dumb-reader ablation (proves the numbers aren't reader-inflated), and an optional local-or-hosted LLM
judge. The anti-cheating checklist (no query rewriting, no LLM at ingest, no gold leakage, seeded sampling),
conflict handling, failure traces, and the verbatim MCP policy are in
docs/methodology.md.
Local-first: every memory lives in a SQLite file on your machine, recall returns the exact stored text,
and capture/recall/forget make no network calls. No account, API key, or telemetry. The only outbound
traffic is a one-time embedding-model download (for the local backend) and the package install.
Optional encryption at rest: set MIDAS_MCP_KEY with the [encrypted] extra and the store is a
SQLCipher database — unreadable without the key (and Midas fails closed rather than silently writing
plaintext). Full details in PRIVACY.md · MIT.