Comment by steveklabnik

5 days ago

Memory features are useful for the same reason that a human would use a database instead of a large .md file: it's more efficient to query for something and get exactly what you want than it is to read through a large, ultimately less structured document.

That said, Claude now has a native memory feature as of the 2.0 release recently: https://docs.claude.com/en/docs/claude-code/memory so the parent's tool may be too late, unless it offers some kind of advantage over that. I don't know how to make that comparison, personally.

Claude’s memory function adds a note to the file(s) that it reads on startup. Whereas this tool pulls from a database of memories on-demand.

  • So hilariously, I hadn't actually read those docs yet, I just knew they added the feature. It seems like the docs may not be up to date, as when I read them in response to your reply here, I was like "wait, I thought it was more sophisticated than that!"

    The answer seems to be both yes and no: see their announcement on youtube yesterday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yct0MvNtdfU&t=181s

    It's still ultimately file-based, but it can create non-Claude.md files in a directory it treats more specially. So it's less sophisticated than I expected, but more sophisticated than the previous "add this to claude.md" feature they've had for a while.

    Thanks for the nudge to take the time to actually dig into the details :)

The other point here, I wanted something more in line with LLMs natural language, something that can be queried more effeciently buy just using normal language, almost like the way we think normally, we first have a though and then we go through our memory archive.

It's had native memory in the form of per-directory CLAUDE.md files for a while though. Not just 2.0