Alice
The continuity layer for AI agents.
uvx alice-memory install --data-dir ~/.alice
uvx alice-memory demo --vault ~/Notes --data-dir ~/.alice-demo
alice-memory doctor prints sources, then candidates.
Alice is a local-first memory service for AI agents. It lets them resume interrupted work, track open loops, recall decisions with provenance, and improve when corrected. They do not have to re-read transcripts or trust opaque summaries.
Alice is a public alpha with one maintainer, and most of its code is written by AI coding agents (how it is built). Read the known limitations before you rely on it.
Agents connect over MCP, HTTP API, or CLI. Humans stay in control. Agent writes land as policy-checked commits or reviewable proposals. On SQLite you approve, correct, or forget memory with the full tool set (ALICE_MCP_FULL_TOOLS=1). The Postgres stack adds a local review console.
How Alice compares
Most agent memory tools, such as mem0, Zep, and Letta, focus on extracting facts from conversations and retrieving them later. Alice focuses on continuity: it stores typed continuity objects (decisions, open loops, resumption briefs) alongside plain memories; source-backed answers trace to the evidence that was supplied; and writes go through policy: memories extracted from captured or imported text stay candidates until someone reviews them, and a fact an agent commits directly is policy-checked and recorded with the writer's identity, so it can be traced and corrected. Confirming a pending write relies on the agent asking the user; it is not a human gate. Explicit commits may legitimately have no source reference. If you mainly need conversational fact recall, those tools are solid choices. If your agents need to resume work, honor past decisions, and explain why they believe something, that is what Alice is built for.
Alice runs alongside other memory tools. A stack can use a fact-extraction memory for conversational recall and Alice for governed continuity.
What Alice stores
- Memories: typed, revisioned facts with trust classification and, when evidence was supplied, provenance links to that source evidence.
- Decisions: what was decided, when, and what superseded it.
- Open loops: blockers, waiting-fors, and follow-ups that agents can query, create, and close.
- Resumption briefs: "here is where work stopped, and what should happen next" for a project or thread.
- Provenance and audit: source-backed memories identify their supplied sources; reviews and corrections preserve their audit chain. Explicit commits may legitimately have no source reference.
Corrections are first-class: when a memory is corrected or superseded, future recall reflects the correction and the explanation chain shows why.
Quickstart
The fastest path is the packaged runtime from PyPI. Needs uv, which fetches Python for you. Or Python 3.12+ with pip. No Docker, Node or Postgres.
uvx alice-memory install --data-dir ~/.alice
# or, without uv: pip install alice-memory && alice-memory install --data-dir ~/.alice
That writes Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenClaw MCP config, plus a SessionStart hook for Claude Code and Cursor so the next session can inject the brief. It backs up each file before it rewrites it, and --dry-run prints the plan and writes nothing. It does not import a vault. See Install with alice-memory.
Any --host replaces the default set, so name every host you want written.
Hermes is opt-in with --host hermes, which edits config.yaml in Hermes's home. See Hermes.
OpenCode is opt-in with --host opencode, which writes opencode.json or opencode.jsonc. See OpenCode.
Codex is opt-in with --host codex, which edits config.toml in Codex's home and adds a SessionStart hook that Codex skips until you trust it once. See Codex.
The Claude Code plugin in plugins/alice-memory installs from the alicememory marketplace:
claude plugin marketplace add samrusani/AliceMemory
claude plugin install alice-memory@alicememory
The marketplace file on main pins the plugin to the v0.22.0 tag commit, so add it from main, not from a checkout of a tag. See Claude Code plugin, which lists what each tag pins.
For a host that wants a config file, paste this (no DATABASE_URL):
{
"mcpServers": {
"alice": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["alice-memory", "mcp", "--data-dir", "/ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO/.alice"]
}
}
}
To serve MCP yourself after install:
uvx alice-memory mcp --data-dir ~/.alice
# or: pip install alice-memory && alice-memory mcp --data-dir ~/.alice
OpenClaw prefixes MCP tool names with the server name, so alice_recall reaches the model as alice__alice_recall.
Install note: the PyPI package is
alice-memory. The namealice-coreon PyPI belongs to an unrelated project.
Full stack (Postgres + review console)
For Postgres with pgvector, the web review console, and the core memory scheduler workflows, run from a repo checkout. Requirements: Python 3.12+, Node 20+, pnpm, Docker, Git. The clone checks out main, which can be ahead of the latest release. To run v0.22.0, run git checkout v0.22.0 before make setup.
git clone https://github.com/samrusani/AliceMemory.git
cd AliceMemory
make setup
make migrate
make doctor
make dev
make dev runs the API on port 8000 and the review console at http://localhost:3000/vnext. The alpha quickstart has the full walkthrough, with demo data and smoke checks.
Connect an agent
MCP
Point any MCP-capable agent or IDE at the Alice server. For the packaged SQLite runtime, use the uvx config from the Quickstart. For the full Postgres stack from a checkout, use the config in agent integration.
The default MCP surface is three tools:
alice_memory_commit: record one fact as durable, immediately recallable memory. Policy-checked: committed, confirmation-required, review-required, or rejected.alice_recall: search memory, with full-text, vector and entity-graph results fused by rank. Also returns matching passages from captured documents undersources.alice_resume: resumption brief for a project or thread.
The other core tools (alice_capture, alice_context_pack, alice_open_loops, alice_recent_decisions, alice_memory_review, alice_memory_correct, alice_memory_manage, alice_explain) stay defined and become listed and callable when ALICE_MCP_FULL_TOOLS=1. From v0.21.0, alice_what_changed is one of the other nine core tools, and v0.20.2 does not have it. Capture and import store sources; commit stores a fact.
Calling directly from a human client (Claude Desktop, an IDE)? alice_memory_commit needs only title and canonical_text, with no identity fields. Agent integrations declare agent_id and agent_type, and custom agents calling the HTTP API use per-agent API keys; see agent integration, which also covers the optional skill packs. Every tool is listed in MCP tools. The retained legacy tools need ALICE_MCP_LEGACY_TOOLS=1 and a keyless local-operator server; see the MCP guide.
Embeddings
Semantic search works with any OpenAI-compatible embeddings endpoint, such as Ollama, LM Studio, or OpenAI:
ALICE_EMBEDDINGS_BASE_URL=http://localhost:11434/v1
ALICE_EMBEDDINGS_MODEL=nomic-embed-text
ALICE_EMBEDDINGS_API_KEY= # only if the endpoint requires one
Alice embeds only memories that recall can return, and cuts each memory and each query to its first 8,000 characters; ALICE_EMBEDDINGS_MAX_INPUT_CHARS changes that cap. Search fuses full-text, vector, and entity-graph results by reciprocal rank: FTS5 and cosine similarity on SQLite, full-text search and pgvector 0.8+ (iterative HNSW) on Postgres. With no embeddings endpoint, search skips the vector list and the retrieval trace says so. Details are in MCP tools.
Benchmark
The published LongMemEval figures carry a known issue: the model answering each question could see which sessions held the evidence. Alice on LongMemEval gives the figures, the method and the issue. The showcase baseline compares Alice with grep, a note folder and no tool on two question sets, measured on main after v0.20.2. The Phase 1 results for v0.21.0 compare passage ranking with the earlier document ranking on those sets and a harder one.
Status
v0.22.0 is the latest published release and remains the install, checksum, and release-note baseline. v0.21.1 is the immediately prior published release. Current state lists the tags that were never published. Alice is a public-alpha, pre-1.0 project:
- Local-first, single-user. One operator, one machine (or one headless server reached over SSH).
- Review-governed writes. Agents propose or commit through policy; outcomes are commit, confirm, review, or reject. The review step is the trust boundary for durable memory.
- No hosted service. There is no cloud offering yet; you run Alice yourself.
- No channels or bundled chat runtime. Telegram, hosted administration, chief-of-staff and chat features, and the public
/v0/responsesendpoint are not part of the current product. - No managed OAuth or automatic polling. Gmail and Calendar compatibility is manual-token only, and unmounted by default behind
ALICE_LEGACY_SURFACES=1. - No automatic capture from arbitrary conversation. Durable memory comes from explicit commits, reviewable proposals, or captured sources, never from silent transcript mining.
- No OCR or transcription execution. Alice accepts text extracted by an external tool.
Docs
- Quickstart walkthrough
- Agent integration
- MCP tools
- Custom agent guide
- Known limitations
- Backup and restore
- Single-tenant deployment
- Disaster recovery
- Health and monitoring
- Upgrade v0.12.0 to current
- Security and privacy
- v0.22.0 release notes
- All release notes
- Release procedure
- Architecture
- Roadmap
- Changelog
How it is built
Most of the code is written by AI coding agents (Codex, Claude Code and Cursor's agent). One agent builds each change and another reviews it. A new test only counts once breaking the code on purpose makes it fail, and CI runs the installer against real, pinned versions of four of the seven agent hosts it writes config for. Claude Desktop, Cursor and OpenClaw are not run against a real host in CI. The maintainer sets the direction and publishes each release.
Contributing
Issues, integrations, importers, and eval contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md.
Security
Security posture: automated security scanning and internal adversarial review, findings triaged and fixed. No one outside the project has audited the code.
If you discover a security issue, follow the process in SECURITY.md.
License
MIT. See LICENSE.