KMP — Agent memory that remembers why

Local first. Evidence attached. Time included.

KMP gives Codex, Claude Code and Hermes Agent local-first memory that preserves what happened, when and why. It stores decisions and evidence, not transcripts, on embedded SQLite. Memory tools retrieve and audit that evidence, semantic view tools guide a shared ChronoLoom view, and a progressive guide teaches the agent how to use them. The running server’s tools/list defines the current tool surface.

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• old decisions are superseded, never quietly rewritten;
• UNKNOWN is 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 and initialize your memory

Codex CLI

codex plugin marketplace add underpass-ai/kmp --ref marketplace
codex plugin add kmp@underpass

Then ask Codex to run kmp-setup and restart Codex once.

Hermes Agent

With kmp-mcp installed, register it and install the skills through the native lifecycle:

kmp-mcp setup --host hermes

Restart Hermes once. See the plugin installation guide for engine packages and host ownership.

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add underpass-ai/kmp@marketplace
/plugin install kmp@underpass
/kmp:setup

Restart Claude Code once. Verify the installation with the kmp-doctor workflow, or from a terminal:

kmp-mcp info
kmp-mcp doctor

Then ask Codex to run kmp-guide, or run /kmp:guide in Claude Code. This loads the installed agent and human guides into the selected store. Setup installs assets without writing memory; a fresh store can return GUIDE_UNAVAILABLE until the explicit guide sync runs.

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.

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:

kmp-mcp config memory-routing always
kmp-mcp config memory-routing on-request   # the default

How it works — the 10-second version

flowchart LR
    U[You] --> H[Codex or Claude]
    H --> S[KMP skill]
    S -->|chooses a move| M[kmp-mcp]
    M --> K[embedded kernel]
    K --> D[(.kernel/\nSQLite)]
    K --> V[local read-only viewer]

The plugin installs the skills and declares one local MCP process. The skill turns intent into one or more 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?

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 MCP moves

Over memory, over the view a person is looking at, and one for persistent agent identity and progressive guidance. tools/list is the authority.

Tool	Purpose
kmp_guide	Open a capability map, preserve agent identity and expand one worked card.
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_time	Move through memory on one clock: rewind and forward page backward and forward from a cursor or through an interval, goto jumps to a time, sequence or ref, near reads the neighbourhood around one.
kmp_trace	Audit a path between two refs, or search for evidence from seed refs; inspect returned support and completeness.
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_condense	Write a compact reader card for one stored body, bound to the exact version it was read from.
kmp_summaries_audit	Read where an about's memories stand with respect to their English search summaries: what is missing, what the lint refuses, and what stands and still retrieves little.
kmp_curate	Review the relations of one or several abouts with TypeSafe Jev as an opt-in second reader: pairs nothing declares, with the type Jev would choose, and declared relations whose reason Jev doubts. The agent writes every relation.
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

.kernel/ is machine state and is ignored by git. A project-scoped store also maintains .kmp/memory.jsonl. Export and Git commit are local operations; pushing, syncing or sharing the bundle makes its contents available elsewhere. Review its diff before sharing. Evidence read by the agent is also subject to the host's data policy, independently of whether you share the bundle.

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 memories[].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 with search_summaries containing ref and summary_en, 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 generative model is required for the default embedded path. KMP validates, stores and retrieves evidence; your agent writes the final answer and the English search summary. Optional TypeSafe Jev features send selected text to an external model for judgments, and optional semantic retrieval uses a local encoder. These integrations require explicit configuration. See retrieval defaults and opt-ins.

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 an unsupported store format. Current SQLite stores support multiple local hosts.

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
• Retrieval defaults and store configuration
• 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.