pi-total-recall

Complete context stack for pi. One install gives your agent persistent memory, session history, and local knowledge search.

What's included

Together, these give pi three layers of context about you:

• What you prefer — coding style, tool choices, project conventions (memory)
• What you've done — past sessions, debugging history, previous decisions (session search)
• What you know — notes, docs, research, reference material (knowledge search)

Install

pi install npm:pi-total-recall

That's it. All three extensions are active immediately.

Requires Node 24+. pi-session-search and pi-knowledge-search use SQLite FTS5 via node:sqlite, which is compiled into Node 24 but not Node 22. On Node 22 you'll see Error: no such table: sessions at startup — upgrade Node and restart pi.

Tools

After installing, your agent gets these tools:

Memory

Session History

Knowledge Search

Configuration

Each component has its own configuration in ~/.pi/agent/settings.json. See the individual package READMEs for details:

Memory

{
  "memory": {
    "lessonInjection": "selective"
  }
}

Knowledge Search

Point it at your notes directory:

{
  "knowledge-search": {
    "paths": ["~/Documents/Notes"]
  }
}

Session History

Works out of the box — indexes your existing pi sessions automatically.

Project-local storage

By default, all three components write to user-global locations under ~/.pi/ — which is usually what you want, because memory, sessions, and a notes index are normally global across projects.

If you want a project's memory/index to be isolated — e.g. a throwaway prototype, a client repo, or an experimental agent setup — drop a pi-total-recall.localPath key into {project}/.pi/settings.json:

{
  "pi-total-recall": {
    "localPath": ".pi/total-recall"
  }
}

Path resolution: relative paths are resolved against the project root (where you run pi), not the .pi/ directory. So ".pi/total-recall" above resolves to {project}/.pi/total-recall/, and "./data" would resolve to {project}/data/. Use an absolute path (e.g. "/Users/you/shared-index") if you want to pin outside the project.

The key is case-sensitive (localPath, lowercase l). A misspelled key like LocalPath is silently ignored — v1.3.2+ of the bundled packages will log a console.error warning when this happens.

That single key cascades to all three packages:

You can also override any single package independently — package-specific keys win over the cascade:

{
  "pi-total-recall": { "localPath": ".pi/total-recall" },
  "pi-knowledge-search": {
    "localPath": "/some/other/path"   // overrides just this one
  }
}

Resolution order (highest priority first) for every package:

1. Package-specific env vars (KNOWLEDGE_SEARCH_CONFIG, etc.)
2. pi-<package>.localPath in {cwd}/.pi/settings.json
3. pi-total-recall.localPath cascade
4. Global default under ~/.pi/

Caveat: session-search source stays global

pi-session-search relocates only its own config and index — the session source directories (~/.pi/agent/sessions, ~/.pi/agent/sessions-archive) are pi's own files and remain global. That's where pi writes sessions, so making them project-local would point the tool at an empty directory. Use the project filter on session_search and session_list if you want to scope results to one project.

Cleanup

When using pi-total-recall.localPath:

rm -rf {project}/.pi/total-recall   # nukes memory, session-search config+index, knowledge-search config+index

Individual packages

If you only want one or two components, install them directly:

pi install @samfp/pi-memory
pi install pi-session-search
pi install pi-knowledge-search

License

MIT