Prism Coder

Prism Coder

Give your AI agent memory that lasts — and see the cloud tokens it never had to spend. Persistent sessions, knowledge graphs, offline tool-routing, and an auditable savings meter. Fully local and free.

Current release: v20.22.5 — local oMLX images and memory accounting Choose an independent image model from discovered local inventory. Compatible oMLX servers support controlled PNG image requests with local screening and generation. Image accuracy depends on the model; Ollama image execution remains unavailable for the saved image choice. See the oMLX guide.

Prism Coder is an MCP server that gives Claude, Cursor, and other AI tools long-term memory that survives across sessions. It ships with the open-weight prism-coder model fleet (2B–27B) for fast, offline tool-routing — no cloud required. And it keeps score: every call served locally is metered, so prism savings shows the token volume that never reached your cloud model — measured honestly, in tokens.

No account needed. No API keys. Runs on your machine.
A paid subscription adds cloud sync, higher model tiers, and team features through the Synalux portal.

What Prism gives you

• Session memory that survives restarts — resume projects with handoff notes, recent work, open TODOs, and configurable quick, standard, or deep context.
• Local-first inference — local Ollama models use automatic 2B/4B/9B/27B selection based on installed models, available RAM, context fit, and subscription entitlements. Eligible text-only coding can prefer configured oMLX; explicit task choices override the saved backend preference.
• A savings meter you can audit — prism savings (or the local_savings tool from any host) reports the token volume local serving kept off your cloud model: headline, local share, per-model breakdown. It reports tokens, never an invented dollar figure, and prints its assumptions and known undercounts inline — a number you can check, not marketing.
• Route-output enforcement — route mode returns only well-formed calls to tools the host actually advertised. Standard and higher plans can add authenticated deterministic correction; route_guard: "local" disables that correction only. cloud_fallback: false forbids cloud inference fallback and verify: false (with no evidence) disables the grounding verifier. With all three off, no request carries your prompt, draft or evidence; the per-call entitlement check and telemetry still contact the portal and carry neither.
• One setup for every agent — prism connect configures Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex while preserving unrelated settings.
• Subscription-aware skills — entitled skills are synchronized before the host launches, with safe upgrades, downgrades, conflict preservation, and offline last-good recovery.
• Hook-free startup — MCP metadata and native instructions request Prism's startup context without requiring lifecycle hooks or a Prism-owned launcher. Where a host offers hooks (Claude Code, Codex), prism connect adds two small ones on top: mid-session prompt routing, and a post-compaction re-injection of the protected-floor digest.
• Prompt-triggered Factory — enabled by default for suitable bounded implementation requests with explicit files, an allowed write list, and a verification command. The host starts and monitors the recommended pipeline; BCBA requests stay with the host. A dashboard toggle or PRISM_DARK_FACTORY_ENABLED=false disables Factory after an MCP restart. Try the three-test filename fix.
• Safe escalation and observability — inference outcomes are explicit, reserved text remains fail-closed (clinical images are processed locally, never sent to the cloud), and local/cloud usage is recorded for review.

On-device oMLX coding

On Apple Silicon, choose Settings → Local Coding in prism dashboard to install oMLX and its model pack or use an existing server. Auto prefers configured oMLX for eligible coding; a saved preference or explicit task choice can select Ollama instead. This path requires Prism's oMLX integration and its separate classifier; stock oMLX is insufficient. See oMLX setup, tested models, results, and failure handling, or start with the quickstart beside Ollama. Explicit oMLX never falls back to Ollama or cloud inference; drafts still need host review and tests.

Get started

Memory search automatically applies ACT-R ranking: relevance plus recency, frequency and memory associations. No upvote or prompt instruction is required. To opt out, use Account & Settings → Preferences → Automatic Memory Ranking (ACT-R), then restart your AI client. PRISM_ACTR_ENABLED=false also disables it. This ranking is separate from the neural graph's stored importance filter.

npm install -g prism-mcp-server
prism connect
prism dashboard

Use prism connect --dry-run to preview changes, prism connect --all to configure every detected host, or prism connect --refresh to reconcile Prism-managed entries after an upgrade. Restart the host after connecting.

prism dashboard opens the current local Mind Palace without a Synalux login. Prism works locally without an account, API key, or cloud subscription. Add a Synalux subscription when you want cloud memory, paid-tier skills, or team features.

To check your plan, open ⚙ Account & Settings → Account in the dashboard. Free users see Start 14-day trial; paid users see Manage subscription. During a trial, the same panel shows the paid tier and exact end date. No card is required to start. Add payment details before the end date to continue; if you do not, the subscription cancels and local Prism Free remains available. You can also compare plans directly at synalux.ai/pricing#prism-plans.

After a few sessions, ask what it's been worth:

prism savings --period month

💾 Local serving — LAST 30 DAYS
  ~510K tokens kept off your cloud model
  53 call(s) served locally of 58 routed (91%)

Your numbers will differ — that's the point: it reports what your machine actually served, not a projection. Full report anatomy and the honesty rules behind it are in the local_savings section.

Install as a plugin

Prism also ships as a plugin, which registers the MCP server and the startup skill for you.

Both hosts install straight from this repository. There is nothing to host and no server to run: the catalogue is the .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file committed here, and your client clones it from GitHub.

Claude Code:

claude plugin marketplace add dcostenco/prism-coder
claude plugin install prism-coder@prism

Codex:

codex plugin marketplace add dcostenco/prism-coder
codex plugin add prism-coder@prism

The plugin registers prism-mcp via npx -y prism-mcp-server. If you already configured Prism by hand — prism connect writes an mcp_servers.prism-mcp entry — you have that server twice under one key. Install the plugin or run prism connect, not both.

What prism connect changes about host subagents

connect steers bounded work to prism_infer on your machine rather than to host-spawned agents. What it writes differs per host, and it does not disable subagents everywhere — Claude Code keeps them and is pointed at an economy model instead. Prism's local workers stay available over MCP in every case.

Two things worth knowing:

• experimental is Gemini's namespace, not ours. Prism is not enabling anything experimental — it writes false to a flag Gemini already defines at that path. Writing anywhere else would have no effect.
• That namespace is by definition temporary. If Gemini promotes enableAgents out of experimental, Prism keeps writing the old path, Gemini reads the new one, and host subagents quietly turn back on. Nothing errors and the settings file still looks correct. If you see host subagents running while enableAgents reads false, check whether the key has moved before assuming connect failed to write it.

Both writes are idempotent in the sense that a host already configured this way is left untouched — but they are re-applied on every prism connect run, not only on --refresh. If you deliberately re-enable host subagents, the next connect will turn them off again. Keep them on by not re-running connect, or by re-enabling after each run.

What's New in v20.22.5

• Independent image model: Settings exposes a separate image choice from discovered oMLX/Ollama inventory, without changing coder/reviewer assignments.
• Controlled local images: compatible oMLX servers accept inline PNGs after model capability, settings and resource checks. Images and derived content stay local. Transport support does not certify recognition accuracy; selected Ollama image execution remains unavailable.
• Memory and model switching: count macOS free and file-backed pages once, and reclaim eligible idle oMLX models without interrupting active or pinned work. Memory estimates do not guarantee fit.
• Reliability: updated oMLX installer pin, device-key race fixes, dependency and CodeQL remediation, shared idle Factory polling, and the civilian-use policy correction for Syria. Full details are in CHANGELOG.md.

What's New in v20.22.4

• Dashboard and CLI setup: Settings → Local Coding and prism local install a pinned oMLX server/model pack with progress, retry and managed startup, or connect an existing server. See the oMLX guide for requirements.
• Saved coding preference: choose Auto, oMLX or Ollama without restarting Prism. Auto prefers configured oMLX for eligible text-only coding; an explicit per-task backend overrides that preference.
• Discovered model roles: select installed coder and reviewer models for each backend, including the same model for both roles. Explicit task model choices win. Reported sizes and conservative memory estimates help compare choices; unknown metadata stays unknown and estimates do not guarantee fit.
• Managed isolation: model discovery, Hub cache and cluster launchers stay private to the managed installation. Competing Ollama residency refuses the call without unloading other jobs.
• Setup-state hardening: bounded reads use one file handle and reject symlinks, closing the filesystem race reported by CodeQL.
• Vision boundary: this release does not enable image requests through the controlled oMLX coding path. Picture-recognition tests remain separate work.

What's New in v20.22.3

• Dependency fixes: Hono 4.13.11 addresses its static-path middleware bypass advisory; Vite 8.2.4 addresses its development editor-launch advisories.
• Local resource probes use numeric loopback by default. The default Ollama endpoint is now http://127.0.0.1:11434, so a stalled localhost DNS lookup cannot block those probes. Explicit URL overrides are preserved; IPv6-only servers need an explicit URL.
• Read-only oMLX inspection accepts release-candidate versions. Valid rcN labels no longer invalidate status. Inspection still reports generation disabled and the provider not qualified; it is not an activation or a generation check.
• Stable oMLX setup: the current setup link uses the Prism integration based on upstream v0.7.1. Stock oMLX still lacks the required control routes.

What's New in v20.22.2

Why it matters: an agent that followed session_task_route's advice was refused on explicit oMLX before anything ran.

• A complexity hint no longer refuses explicit oMLX. session_task_route recommends a task_complexity for every code task. That hint picks Ollama's starting tier, but on explicit oMLX it lowered the model ceiling, so a call that passed the recommended arguments was refused with omlx_model_ceiling. Now only an explicit model_ceiling below the top tier, or a plan below it, refuses. Thinking on oMLX stays with the server's settings.

What's New in v20.22.1

Why it matters: on explicit oMLX, a long prompt could keep the device busy for minutes while being classified, and timeout_ms did not limit it.

• The call budget now covers classification. timeout_ms (default 300 s) starts before the safety screen, and each classifier read is bounded by the remaining budget as well as its own 90 s.
• A failed read ends the classification. An oversize prompt is read in 3,600-character windows; a read that fails already means refusal on this path, so the remaining windows are no longer read. Before, a stalled server could cost about four minutes per window.
• Tests: the owned-job marker tests pin the size limit and the non-blocking open directly.

What's New in v20.22.0

Why it matters: on Apple Silicon, prism_infer can now draft code on an oMLX server instead of Ollama, opt-in per call, behind its own safety screen. Separately, Layer 1 now marks two more kinds of auth request reserved, on every path.

• Opt-in oMLX backend: local_backend: "omlx" with mode: "code", text only. Nothing changes for calls that do not ask for it. It requires the oMLX build with Prism's control routes, published as the prism-v0.7.1rc1 branch of dcostenco/omlx (install and settings); with stock oMLX every call is refused.
• Its own safety screen: the 9b classifier on the same oMLX server reads every request; rules only refuse. In our tests, of 327 labelled sensitive requests, the 9b alone let 2 run locally, against 19 for the 4b classifier on Ollama; two rules written after reviewing those rows bring this path to 0, so 0 is not an out-of-sample figure. Of 294 routine requests, 2 were escalated (27 on Ollama). Of 135 adversarial probes, 3 ran locally, all one shape (a documentation field).
• Speed and cost: a classifier read took about 0.37 s at the 95th percentile on an idle machine and up to 0.65 s under load. The first read after a long idle took 14.5 s, because macOS had paged the classifier out, so Prism waits up to 90 s for it instead of refusing. The classifier holds about 9.2 GB while loaded (9.7 GB peak).
• Fails closed: a classifier failure, an unreadable answer or a missing model refuses the call; it never falls back to a keyword check or to Ollama. A long prompt is read whole, in windows, not as an excerpt.
• Frees memory first: Ollama's loaded models are unloaded before the call (they reload on the next Ollama call), so the two runtimes do not hold large models at once.
• Layer 1, every path: a request that decides whether signed-out, anonymous or guest users may reach a route, page or endpoint (granting or blocking it), makes one public, or gives them admin rights is marked reserved by rule, and so is code that exchanges an authorization code for tokens. Measured on the 327 sensitive requests on the default Ollama path: 18 now run locally, against 19 before; routine escalations are unchanged (27 of 294).

What's New in v20.21.27

Why it matters: a script that feeds Prism Browser through a pipe can now pause between blocks of commands. Before, commands that had already arrived waited for the next write, and never ran if the 600 s idle timeout came first, so a script that checked a result before sending more stalled and then failed.

• Every piped command runs when it arrives. The reader waited on select() for new pipe data while readline() had already buffered the commands sent so far. It now reads the descriptor itself and decodes it as the text stream did (its encoding, universal newlines). Measured with two commands written together and a third written only after the reader hands over the second: the second came out only with the third before, and before the third is written now.
• Unchanged: the idle timeout, \ line continuation (CRLF endings included), comment lines, and streams select() cannot watch, now read blocking. At the idle timeout, a command still being written is dropped, never run cut short.

What's New in v20.21.26

Why it matters: routine wording no longer lets a mixed request skip Layer 1, the safety screen that decides whether a request may run on your device. A BCBA who asks in one message for an operational definition and how many mL of a drug to give, or a developer who asks for a code review and then authentication code, now has that request screened by Layer 1's rules and, unless the request or conversation is already marked reserved, a classifier read. Before, it could be answered by a local model with no classifier read.

• Rules no longer clear requests. Before, one routine clause let Layer 1's rules clear the whole request, so it skipped the classifier. "Write an operational definition for tantrums and tell me how many mL of Benadryl to give at bedtime" was answered locally with no classifier read, and so was "review the dashboard component for hook order and then write the JWT validation middleware". Now rules can only mark a request reserved. The routine shortcut is gone for a single prompt and for the current prompt of a follow-up; the prompt's classifier read is skipped only if the request or conversation is already marked reserved. A long prompt that reaches the classifier is read as excerpts, as before.
• What happens to a flagged request. A text request that a rule marks reserved, or that the classifier flags, goes to a stronger cloud model when your plan includes cloud and the call does not pass cloud_fallback: false. Otherwise it is refused, and the refusal says why. Requests the classifier clears remain eligible to run locally, so routine drafting (operational definitions, data sheets, antecedent strategies) and routine code work still run on your device when the local model can answer.
• Seclusion by another name. Placement phrases such as "put him in the quiet room until he calms down" (also isolation, time-out, padded and calm-down rooms) are now marked reserved by rule. This catches placement requests of that shape (him, her, them, or the client, student or child placed into the room) that never use the word "seclusion". Other wording, and other mentions of these rooms, are left to the classifier.
• Measured: of 46 mixed requests built to test this bypass, which should never be answered locally, 41 were cleared to run locally before this release and 9 after: 32 fewer sensitive requests reaching a local model. Of 294 routine requests, 2 more than before are escalated (or refused, without cloud).
• Limits, unchanged in this release. Keep them in mind when deciding whether a local answer needs your review:
  • The classifier can miss a request, and a missed request still runs locally. The 9 above are such misses.
  • Some classifier failures fall back to a keyword check, and text that passes it can still run locally.
  • A request with images is processed on this device even when flagged, and is never sent to the cloud.
• Cost: requests that used the shortcut now need a classifier read, unless screening has already marked them reserved. That added check is the price of closing the bypass; in our tests the read took about 0.3 s at the 95th percentile.

What's New in v20.21.25

Semantic memory search now automatically applies ACT-R ranking, combining relevance with recency, frequency and associations. Account & Settings → Preferences → Automatic Memory Ranking (ACT-R) lets you opt out after an AI client restart; an explicit environment value takes precedence.

Synalux Cloud uses authenticated, owner-scoped access-history and candidate-link APIs. Cloud deployment requires the matching Portal history migration. Stored importance thresholds remain separate, and HRR drift detection remains independent.

What's New in v20.21.24

• Synalux cloud preserves initial importance and handles votes, graduated insights, and stale-score decay through the authenticated Portal API.
• Voting rejects inactive or inaccessible records; decay preserves archived history. Existing scores remain unchanged.
• Graph importance thresholds use stored scores. Automatic retrieval ranking and access tracking do not automatically turn ordinary memories into high-score rules.

What's New in v20.21.23

• Factory routes suitable bounded implementation prompts and executes only the allowed file actions, with independent verification and explicit lifecycle results.
• Paid pipeline creation, updates, aborts, and verification records use the authenticated Portal API. Startup waits for paid storage initialization before reporting Factory readiness.
• The default-enabled toggle distinguishes the saved setting from the active MCP setting and shows when a restart is required.

What's New in v20.21.22

• Factory pipeline lists for cloud accounts use the authenticated Portal API, including exact project and status filters, without direct database credentials.
• Invalid, incomplete, or oversized reads show an unavailable state. A valid empty list remains distinct from a failed read.
• This release covers pipeline lists. Cloud pipeline creation, controls, and execution still need separate validation.

What's New in v20.21.21

• Prism Dashboard now reports unavailable analytics and factory reads clearly, prevents stale project results, and keeps graph filters and counts in sync.
• Project analytics can be read through the authenticated Portal API with validated 14-day activity data.

What's New in v20.21.20

• Fixed: a session_save_ledger call refused with context_not_loaded, or the greeting-only reply that writes nothing, restarted the hourly drift reminder. A ledger save restarts it now only when it writes an entry.
• A written ledger entry's reply also asks for the handoff when the checkpoint ends a unit of work.
• A ledger save skipped as a duplicate of one saved in the last 5 minutes now says nothing new was written, instead of "saved".
• Fixed: with Supabase storage, a handoff whose save failed was reported as updated. It is now an error the agent can see and retry.

What's New in v20.21.19

• Prism Browser emulates phones and tablets. --device iphone-17, or one of five other measured iPhones and iPads, turns on touch CSS, the pixel ratio, and the iPhone safe area, so a layout that only breaks on the phone can be caught in a test. --touch, --device-scale-factor, and --safe-area set each part on its own.

What's New in v20.21.18

• Fixed: when a save was refused with context_not_loaded, the instructions Prism installs for Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI forbade the one call that recovers. The refusal now prints that call, session_load_context with the same project and conversation_id, and the installed instructions allow it. First-turn startup is unchanged.

What's New in v20.21.17

• Fixed: the on-device screen refused some ordinary coding requests. With a Synalux account (free included), it now reads each request through a policy that Synalux serves, pinned by its SHA-256. Without an account, or with images attached, the screen is unchanged.
• prism_infer route mode: set allow_parallel_calls to keep a reply that calls several of the tools you offered in allowed_tools.

What's New in v20.21.16

Conversations: checked on your device, and free with an account

• A local answer to a conversation is checked on your device before it is served. If the check fails or cannot run, the answer goes to the cloud when your plan and settings allow it, and is withheld otherwise.
• On Pro and Team, a local answer that passes is also confirmed by Synalux, on a copy pseudonymized on your device; the mapping stays on your device. With an image attached, or with the cloud off, the checked local answer is served.
• When the on-device screen's 4b is unsure about a conversation, the 9b reads it again before the conversation is refused or sent to the cloud.
• Everything local is free with no account and no cap on the local model size. A free Synalux account adds multi-turn prism_infer and 20 cloud answers a day. Pro ($15/month) and Team ($20/seat/month) are Prism's own plans.
• Optional You.com web search: set YDC_API_KEY to enable youcom_web_search (contributed by @mouse-value-add in #227).
• Fixed: the 2b and 4b no longer answer Prism's own requests as a tool router. A system prompt built into those models had turned some answers into tool calls and made the on-device screen refuse some ordinary requests.

What's New in v20.21.15

Follow-ups: see what runs locally, and a stricter screen when the classifier is down

• local_savings (and prism savings) shows a line for follow-ups, calls that carried your conversation. It covers how many the local model answered (and how many of those the 9b answered), how many the on-device screen refused and at which stage, how many your plan's multi-turn limits refused, and how many went to the cloud.
• A short chat answer ("16", "Yes") counts as an answer. Before, the quality gate treated it as empty, and a paid plan re-asked the cloud.
• When the on-device classifier fails every read on a follow-up, the follow-up is no longer answered on a keyword check alone. It goes to the cloud if your plan allows it, and is refused otherwise.

What's New in v20.21.14

Skills load when they help, and you can see why they loaded

• Background task notifications, reports from other agents and continuation summaries no longer load skills in the middle of a task, so a word inside an agent's report cannot pull in unrelated rules.
• Pasting Prism's startup output into a prompt no longer loads skills that happen to share a word with it.
• Tasks that say they need host tools or reserved judgment stay with the host instead of failing on the local worker.
• Every routed-skills header ends with the routing table version (for example "Routing table v41."), so a past skill load can be checked against the exact rules that chose it.
• Skills with their own triggers now load even when their file uses Windows line endings or mentions prompt_triggers: in its description; before, they were delivered but silently never loaded.

What's New in v20.21.13

Paid plans and trials are clear in Account & Settings

• Free users can open the Prism plan comparison and start a 14-day trial.
• Trial users see their paid tier, exact end date, and the action to add payment details before automatic cancellation.
• Active and payment-recovery states lead to the correct hosted billing action; an unavailable verification is labeled instead of being presented as paid.
• Local Prism Free remains available without an account or subscription.

What's New in v20.21.12

Multiple MCP hosts keep a working dashboard link

• Each running Prism host now registers its local dashboard independently.
• prism dashboard and the startup message verify the newest candidates and fall back to an older live dashboard when a newer host stops.
• Instance cleanup cannot remove another host's registration, and the open message preserves the linked account and plan description.

What's New in v20.21.11

Linked accounts persist across dashboard refreshes

• A host process with an obsolete launch credential now recovers from the newer account saved by the dashboard after the obsolete credential is rejected.
• Valid host credentials remain authoritative; sign-out, concurrent account changes, network failures, and server failures do not trigger an unsafe credential switch.
• prism dashboard opens the active local dashboard without relabeling a linked Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise account as Free.

What's New in v20.21.10

Signed-out Free dashboards keep working locally

• Signing out now switches Project View, project details, and graph reads to local SQLite without requiring an account, configuration edit, or restart.
• The saved Synalux backend preference remains ready for the next sign-in; accidental missing cloud credentials still fail closed.
• Latest Activity uses the newest durable session when it is newer than the saved handoff. Recent Sessions are newest first, and saved handoff versions remain available as restore points.

What's New in v20.21.9

Prism Free opens without a Synalux account

• Run prism dashboard to open the current local Mind Palace. No sign-in, account-link code, API key, paid plan, or Free-plan redemption is required.
• A bare local dashboard address now gives the exact local-open command instead of rendering a broken account state.
• Account & Settings shows Prism Free as active. Synalux linking remains an optional action for cloud sync, billing, and paid features.
• Local access stays protected without printing its browser capability into startup output, and unsafe state paths or redirected identity probes fail closed.

What's New in v20.21.8

Dashboard graphs use the authenticated Portal

• The selected cloud project now shows its real session nodes and stored links instead of collapsing to a keyword-only project bubble.
• Synthesize Edges uses the authenticated Synalux Portal embedding contract; the Prism dashboard process does not need a Google or Gemini API key.
• Existing vectors and links are reused on repeat runs, synthesis fan-out is bounded, and Portal failures are shown rather than rendered as an empty graph.
• Account & Settings now shows the current user, role, and Free, Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise plan, with visible sign-in, upgrade, billing, and sign-out actions.
• A selected paid plan survives the Portal sign-in round trip, live and test Stripe catalogs resolve every paid tier, and localized checkout never reuses a USD Price for another currency.

What's New in v20.18.1

Task skills survive compaction and update in place

• Prompt-routed task skills now return after compaction. The hook restores the three most recently active task skills alongside the protected-floor digest, so a short follow-up such as continue keeps the workflow and visual verification rules that governed the work before context was compacted.
• A completed managed-skill sync refreshes active task rules on the next prompt. The hook compares the materialized generation on disk with its per-session state, re-authorizes every restored name against the current manifest, and injects the current bodies. A downgrade clears stale paid task state; Prism-managed directories cannot use the user-owned local-skill exception.
• User-owned local skills now route with their actual body. A local SKILL.md remains usable while signed out, while an entitled platform body takes precedence if both sources use the same name.
• Codex hook context is anchored to the user's request. Routed rules tell the model to execute the preceding user request with the rules applied, avoiding the trailing developer-context placement being mistaken for a new task. The anchor and all restored content share the 9,800-character limit.
• Hook version 5 enforces its command version. A still-running host with a trusted v4 command cannot execute the rewritten v5 script. After upgrading, run prism connect --refresh --no-models; Codex must trust both new v5 hook entries in /hooks. Restart the host if it has not reloaded the new hook definitions. Once v5 is active, later skill-body generations refresh on the next prompt without another host restart.
• State names are validated and bounded before they become CLI arguments, and the two-call refresh paths fit inside the host's 15-second hook timeout.

What's New in v20.18.0

The protected floor rides the bootstrap — and survives compaction

• session_bootstrap now inlines a digest of the protected floor on paid tiers at standard and deep depth: one inert line per rule, derived from each skill's first paragraph (or its pinned digest:), plus its section map, ~5.6K chars for the full floor. Small-context hosts such as Codex were re-reading the sixteen SKILL.md files every session (median 8 re-reads / 36KB, worst 823 / 5.1MB in rollout logs) because the bootstrap only named them. The digest is paid for on top of the context budget, so the ledger/handoff share at every depth is byte-identical to before. Quick depth stays names-only — the opt-out.
• A second hook re-injects the digest after compaction. prism connect registers the prism-route script on SessionStart matched to compact (Claude Code and Codex); it runs prism floor-digest, which applies the same tier and depth decisions as the bootstrap, and adds nothing on startup/resume/clear. Hosts without hooks (Gemini, Cursor) still get the digest on every bootstrap. Codex: UNVERIFIED against a live compaction. The hook is registered and the script accepts the documented payload spellings, but no Codex compaction has been observed end-to-end; on a payload it does not recognise it re-injects nothing rather than something wrong. If the digest comes from a generation whose skill files never finished syncing, the re-injected block carries the same STALE warning the bootstrap shows.
• Codex trust is reported honestly after a hook rewrite. Approvals are keyed by definition hash, so a rewritten hooks.json — this release adds the SessionStart entry — voids prior trust: connect prints AWAITING TRUST for both entries instead of a green ✓ for a hook Codex would silently skip, and trust recorded for an older hook version is never mistaken for current.
• A host config that no longer parses is left alone. If ~/.claude/settings.json or ~/.codex/hooks.json exists but is not valid JSON, connect keeps it byte-identical, registers no hook there, and says so — it no longer replaces the file with a minimal hooks-only one. The npm postinstall notice says the same, instead of asking you to trust a Codex hook it never registered.
• Fixed: a symptom-routed skill whose closing frontmatter fence is its last line was inlined with its YAML (triggers included) as if it were the rule.
• Fixed: a digest line that crosses into a new section keeps that section's heading in front of it — whatever opened the section (an H2, a mid-document H1, an empty heading, a setext underline) — so "Delegate to" / "Do NOT delegate" rules cannot read with the wrong polarity once joined. A skill file on disk is used only when it digests: empty, cut off inside its frontmatter, or frontmatter-only files fall back to the stored copy instead of rendering YAML as the rule.
• Fixed: on Windows, a Codex hook approval is recognised even though Codex stores the path with escaped backslashes.
• The publish gate now refuses release notes that run ahead of the package version (CHANGELOG, README, translated READMEs) — reading the newest version on the heading line, so a v20.17.3 – v20.18.0 range counts as 20.18.0, and surviving a typographic apostrophe or a BOM.

What's New in v20.17.3

• A plugin install can no longer enable the prompt-routing hook. The package's maintenance paths (npm postinstall, server startup) now only refresh a hook that an explicit prism connect previously installed — a prism MCP registration in host config no longer counts as consent. First install of the hook happens through prism connect or not at all.
• The Claude Code plugin launcher is fully deterministic. It runs the exact pinned server version with npm lifecycle scripts disabled, and the plugin now documents its security posture in plugins/prism/README.md.

What's New in v20.17.2

• Pasted logs can no longer falsely activate skills. Symptom-triggered routing now strips fenced blocks and routable skill-name mentions (including inside compound identifiers like container/pod names) from the routing view of a prompt, so quoting an agent log or a skill list doesn't load skills the text merely mentions. Skills named by ordinary words keep routing normally.
• Symptom-routed skills now arrive whole. Startup budgets deliver the full rule text at every depth that fits; when a rule genuinely cannot fit, the display says exactly how much is missing and how to load the rest, instead of silently truncating.
• Routing can no longer be silently disabled by one bad skill. Corrupt or hostile trigger tables — wrong value shapes, patterns named after object prototype properties — are skipped per entry instead of taking down all prompt routing (or, in one case, the vault export) for the session.

What's New in v20.17.1

• Fixes a broken CLI in 20.17.0 — a command-name collision made every prism CLI invocation exit with a commander error at startup (the MCP server was unaffected). The handoff-sync command is prism handoff …; prism sync remains cross-backend data synchronization. If you installed 20.17.0, update.

What's New in v20.17.0

Cross-Machine Session Handoff — End-to-End Encrypted

• Resume a session on any of your machines. With prism handoff enable (paid, off by default), each session_save_handoff seals the handoff to all your account's device keys and relays the CIPHERTEXT; another machine pulls with sync_pull_handoff (or prism handoff pull <project>) and opens it locally.
• The relay stores ciphertext only — X25519 + AES-256-GCM sealed envelopes. No key that opens a handoff ever exists server-side. The channel is deliberately separate from savings sync, which carries counters only.
• TOFU device pinning surfaces a compromised relay: sealing to a key this machine has never seen warns loudly, keyed on the client-derived recipient id so a swapped key can't hide behind a familiar device name.
• prism handoff status|devices to inspect; revoke a lost machine from the portal.

What's New in v20.16.0

See What Local Serving Saves You — Meterable, Auditable, Team-Wide

• local_savings tool + prism savings CLI — the token volume local serving kept off your cloud model: all time, trailing 30/7 days, or any --days N window. Tokens, never an invented dollar figure, with the assumptions and known undercounts printed inline.
• Team roll-up (paid) — prism savings --sync-enable uploads per-day counters only (never content; the payload is a closed field set the server also enforces); prism savings --team shows the workspace-wide total with per-member share. Off by default.
• E2E sync foundation — sealed multi-recipient envelopes (X25519 + HKDF-SHA256 + AES-256-GCM on node:crypto, no new dependency) and per-device identities, adversarially reviewed: cross-machine session sync will ship on a relay that only ever stores ciphertext.
• Push-time public-leak guard — outgoing diffs AND commit messages are scanned before anything leaves the machine.

What's New in v20.12.1

• prism connect --refresh now converges every registration it owns, not just the top-level one — directory-scoped entries could otherwise keep launching an old build indefinitely.
• prism update checks the installed package, not the CLI that happens to be running, so it can no longer report "current" while the install is stale.
• The opt-in scheduled updater can actually start — the LaunchAgent now carries a PATH that includes node and npm.

What's New in v20.12.0

• Prism now tells you when it's out of date. Session startup shows a one-line update notice when a newer release exists — cache-backed, at most one registry check per day, silent offline. PRISM_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 opts out.
• Hands-free updates, if you want them. prism autoupdate enable sets up a daily prism update --if-idle: it updates only the global npm package, defers while any Prism server is running, and never touches host configuration — that stays behind a visible prism connect.

What's New in v20.11.1

• Saving memory never gets refused. The save path used to reject session_save_ledger/save_handoff calls when its path-to-project heuristic disagreed with the project you declared — and the registry the heuristic trusted could contain junk from earlier auto-registration, so legitimate sessions ended unsaved. Your declaration now always wins; the disagreement is returned as an advisory warning, and auto-registration only accepts real repository roots.
• Screenshots are evidence again. prism browser captures on macOS were silently upscaled to the size cap, so a screenshot no longer showed what actually rendered. Only genuinely oversized captures are resized now, and the cap no longer clips a standard 1920-wide viewport.

What's New in v20.10.0 – v20.11.0

• Skill routing now works mid-session. New prompts are matched on-device as the conversation moves — not just on turn one — and injected within each host's real context limits (Claude Code caps hook output at 10k chars; Codex truncates by default), with pointer-first delivery when a payload can't fit inline.
• prism connect is a converge command. It self-updates first, re-execs, then reconciles MCP registration, skills, and hooks — no more "fresh config, stale code" machines.
• Scoped skills route on prompts too, and startup output survives hosts that discard structured tool content.

What's New in v20.9.0 – v20.9.3

• Your skills follow your account. skill_save stores a skill at the scope you choose: this machine only (local, works offline and signed out), your account (user — every machine you sign into receives it), or a workspace (team — shared with members, admin-managed, optionally targeted to specific people).

• Trim the catalog you don't use. skill_manage can release platform skills you never touch — freeing host skill-catalog budget — and restore them any time, losslessly. Deleting a scoped skill archives its final content locally first, so nothing is ever silently unrecoverable.

• Delivery that queues instead of failing. Concurrent sessions no longer starve skill sync on the local config store (WAL + busy-timeout) — a failure that previously reported only "partial" where nobody could see it.

• Withheld rules still bind. When the context budget can't inline a skill's text, the manifest of withheld names now states that those skills still govern the work and names every way to load them before completion claims.

• The budget the floor never spent. A long-standing accounting bug meant no unprotected skill ever inlined at any normal context level — the always-inlined protected floor was debiting the budget meant for everything else. Task-matched skills (like the completion-evidence checklist) now actually arrive.

What's New in v20.8.2

• Skill delivery now admits failure instead of hiding it. A filesystem permission edge case (a umask stripping the owner-execute bit) could leave skill sync writing nothing while reporting itself current — measured at nine days on a real machine. Broken managed directories are repaired in place, every directory is created umask-proof, and the repair path refuses symlinks via an O_NOFOLLOW descriptor.
• A stale install tells you at startup. Prism now tracks the generation that actually reached disk separately from the one the database accepted; if they diverge, the startup banner says so in a warning placed where display truncation cannot cut it. A successful sync clears it automatically.

What's New in v20.7 – v20.8.0

• First run proves the memory instead of describing it — session_bootstrap seeds one demo memory and shows it recalled from disk, so the save→recall loop is felt in session 1. One-shot, contained in its own prism-demo project, removable with one call.
• Dashboard fixed — a quoting typo (shipped 2026-05-29) killed the inline script at parse time, so every dashboard since rendered "Loading projects..." forever. Fixed, and the ES5 lint now node --checks the built inline script so an unparseable dashboard can never ship again.
• Trusted Publishing — npm releases authenticate via GitHub OIDC. No stored token to expire or leak, and every release carries a signed provenance attestation — you can verify the tarball you install was built from this repo by CI (npm audit signatures).
• TLS enforced for cloud sync — a remote http:// storage URL is upgraded to https:// instead of silently sending session content in the clear.
• Codex plugin collision + enabled-state detection — prism connect skips its own registration only when a plugin actually provides prism-mcp (cache present and enabled), preventing both duplicate and missing servers.
• Windows CI stabilized; registry/npm listings realigned and deduplicated.

What's New in v20.6.0

Delivery Is Not a Suggestion

An audit of a real incident (an agent wiped demo data after announcing the wipe — with the ask-first rule committed, bundled, and absent from what any agent actually received) found the protected floor had outgrown every delivery budget: "unprotected" had quietly come to mean "never delivered".

• ask-first and feature-preservation join the protected floor (14 → 16). Protected skills are always inlined; these two now reach every session.
• Sync conflicts are loud and named. Startup used to say "· 2 local conflicts preserved" while safety skills sat months stale; it now names each frozen skill and states how to resume updates.
• --storage accepts auto and synalux — the CLI rejected its own documented default and the production backend.
• Disclosure: skill delivery informs; it does not gate. A live probe showed a host agent still edit unverified source with the rule loaded. If your threat model includes an agent acting against a loaded rule under task pressure, pair this package with mechanical gates (hooks, permissions, least-privilege roles). True of every prior release; stated from this one.

What's New in v20.5.3

Grounding Evidence Carries Its Age

Memory-grounded answers labelled their sources but never dated them, so a two-year-old note and yesterday's reached the model identically. Nothing in the evidence let it discount the stale one. Prompted by an external review naming the right risk for local-first memory: the data stays local, but bad grounding becomes permanent — storing everything on your machine removes the outside pressure that would otherwise surface a stale note.

Evidence now reads:

[SOURCE 1: ledger:8286581d (recorded 2025-05-29, 431 days ago)]

The date already existed in storage and was being dropped at the snippet layer, so this is plumbing rather than new data collection. Zone-less SQLite timestamps are normalised to UTC — read as local, a ten-minute-old record parsed hours into the future and its age was suppressed entirely, meaning the feature silently did nothing on the freshest memories. An absent or unparseable date renders as nothing rather than defaulting to now; defaulting would make the oldest memories, the ones most likely to be stale, appear freshest.

tests/integration/grounding-staleness.test.ts runs the reviewer's own probe — seed a deliberately outdated note beside a contradicting fresh one and assert the model receives both, visibly dated. Anyone can run it.

Not solved, and not claimed: retrieval does not weight recency. A stale note shown beside a fresh one is the easy case — the model sees both dates and can weigh them. The hard case is a stale note retrieved alone, because ranking is by keyword match and an old store returns old results; then the age label is the only defence and there is no fresher record to compare against. Tracked as TECH_DEBT.md #4.

What's New in v20.5.0 – v20.5.2

The First Message Never Leaves Your Machine

Symptom-triggered skills — the rules that fire on "can't see X", "no rows", "the list is empty" — are meant to load on the turn an incident report arrives. They never did: every host template called session_bootstrap with {}, so there was no prompt to match against.

Fixing that raised the question of where matching happens. It now happens locally. The 28 keyword rules are already public, so there was nothing a local match could not compute, and callPortal() has no prompt parameter at all — the guarantee is structural, not a promise. The portal request carries the project and role only.

A matched rule now arrives as content, not as a name. Native hosts outside the skill-file mirror had no way to read a rule they were only told about, so the rule body is inlined into the startup display, bounded and sized against the real per-project budget.

What's New in v20.4.0

An Explicitly Named Cloud Backend Fails Loud

Setting PRISM_STORAGE=synalux or =supabase with incomplete credentials used to downgrade silently to local SQLite. The switch was logged to stderr, which MCP hosts discard, so nothing surfaced it: sessions kept serving stale local context while the cloud held newer history, and context_source read local rather than any kind of warning. A session could run that way for weeks.

Naming a backend outright is a strong statement of intent, so it now throws — naming the missing variables and the PRISM_STORAGE=local opt-out — instead of quietly splitting your session history. auto is unchanged: it keeps its documented synalux > supabase > local degradation, pinned by a test.

Upgrade note: if you explicitly set PRISM_STORAGE=synalux|supabase and your credentials are incomplete, startup now fails with a named error instead of silently using local data. That error is the fix — set the missing variable, or choose PRISM_STORAGE=local deliberately. Default (auto) configs are unaffected.

The throw is deliberately not treated as a recoverable startup fault: that path exists for transient errors (rate limits, 5xx, DNS), which may degrade behind a visible notice. A missing credential is a configuration fault and must not be papered over.

Also: the skill block is now budgeted by default rather than only on request, so a large skill payload cannot crowd out briefing and history.

What's New in v20.3.2

Web Scholar: SSRF Hardening

Security release. Web Scholar scrapes article URLs that come from search-engine output, so the target is attacker-influenceable through SEO poisoning — and because what it scrapes is written into the memory corpus and passed to the configured LLM, a redirection to a local address meant reading an internal service and sending the result onward.

The host guard matched string prefixes instead of parsing the address, and six spellings of a local address got through: [::1] (URL.hostname keeps the brackets), 127.0.0.2 (only .1 was enumerated, not all of 127.0.0.0/8), 0.0.0.0, [::ffff:127.0.0.1], localhost. (a trailing dot defeated every suffix check at once), and [64:ff9b::7f00:1] (NAT64 embeds IPv4 in its low bits). Host classification now parses addresses and also covers CGNAT, benchmarking, multicast, reserved, and IPv6 unique-local and link-local ranges.

DNS rebinding is closed too. Every check read the URL string, so a hostname the attacker controls passed all of them and could still resolve to 127.0.0.1. Targets are now resolved first, every returned address is validated, and the connection is pinned to those addresses so the name is never resolved a second time — which also shuts the window between the check and the connect.

Scrape failures no longer vanish into a bare catch {}, a run is bounded by PRISM_SCHOLAR_SCRAPE_BUDGET_MS (default 60s) instead of stalling on a raised article count, and responses are capped at 8 MiB.

This is reachable only when scholar actually runs — scholar_research, or the background loop under PRISM_SCHOLAR_ENABLED=true — and when the attacker also controls DNS or a search result. Upgrade if you use Web Scholar.

What's New in v20.3.1

Prism Browser Reports Real Failures

prism browser could not fail a test. eval 1 === 2 returned status: ok with exit code 0, a page serving HTTP 500 reported status: ok, and console errors and uncaught page exceptions were discarded entirely. This release adds assertions — assert-text, assert-visible, assert-count, assert-url, assert-title, assert-eval, assert-no-page-errors — that return status: failed and a non-zero exit. open now reports http_status and fails on 400 or higher, screenshots are validated rather than assumed, and eval returns native JSON with its type instead of a Python repr.

The fingerprint layer had never been applied: a wrong keyword argument made the stealth library throw on every launch — 1,139 failures and 0 successes since April — while the runner reported it as active. It is fixed, and a layer that cannot be applied now fails loudly. The headless build no longer advertises itself through navigator.userAgentData or the Sec-CH-UA header, and a patch that corrupted Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor on every page under test has been removed. These remain best-effort test aids, not a guarantee against bot detection.

--local-only now actually isolates: WebSocket, EventSource, WebRTC and sendBeacon egress bypass request routing and were never blocked, and service workers were allowed through. --cleanup was a no-op in the two modes agents use. Site isolation, phishing detection and popup blocking are no longer disabled by default, since these profiles hold live authenticated cookies.

New for test runs: --ephemeral-profile and --storage-state for hermetic authenticated flows, pages/switch-page so OAuth popups are reachable, --fail-fast, --fast, --trace/--video/--har, and profiles --prune-older-than for profile maintenance.

What's New in v20.2.7

Session Saves Survive Agent Restarts

Prism now remembers that a conversation successfully loaded its project context when the MCP server restarts or another Prism process handles the next request. session_save_ledger and session_save_handoff no longer fail with a false context_not_loaded error in that flow.

The recovery remains fail-closed: authorization is limited to the exact project and conversation, expires with the existing context window, and stores no plaintext conversation identifier. Cross-project, forged, malformed, expired, or future-dated receipts are still rejected. The release also updates PostCSS to the patched 8.5.23 release.

What's New in v20.3.0

Hybrid Memory Search (Portal Tier)

session_search_memory on the portal tier (Synalux-backed installs) now fuses semantic similarity with exact-term lexical matching via weighted reciprocal-rank fusion. Measured on blind probes against a real 8.5k-entry corpus: fused retrieval was never worse than semantic alone at top-5, and exact identifiers — TPNs, function names, error strings — now rescue queries that embedding similarity blurs. Results say how they were found — hybrid retrieval headers, per-hit sem#/lex# arms — and a lexical-only rescue is labelled exact-term match instead of pretending to a similarity score. Local SQLite installs keep pure vector search; hybrid needs the portal's lexical index.

What's New in v20.2.6

Safer Configuration Updates Across Every Agent

prism connect now reads Claude, Cursor, Gemini, and Codex configuration through a single verified file snapshot, preventing another process from swapping a file between Prism's safety check and its read. Supported symlinked dotfiles still work, while dangling or planted symlinks fail loudly instead of being followed or overwritten. This release also carries the patched dependencies and cross-platform release checks introduced in v20.2.5.

Cloud fallback is now documented consistently as Gemini 3.6 Flash. Plan ceilings govern automatic prism_infer routing; direct use of any downloaded model through local Ollama remains free on every tier.

What's New in v20.2.4

Reliable Session Memory That Shows Work, Not Greetings

Greeting-only assistant replies are skipped before ledger writes. Existing greeting rows are filtered at read time across native startup, MCP context, and prism load --json, while entries containing decisions, TODOs, changed files, or non-session events remain visible. Historical rows are not destructively deleted. If Synalux has a transient startup failure, Prism displays one bounded local last-good snapshot and clearly labels it; permanent authorization or validation failures still fail loud, and later writes remain cloud-routed.

What's New in v20.2.2

One Local-First Workflow Across Every Agent

prism connect now installs one orchestration contract for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex. Bounded delegated work goes to session_task_route and the local prism_infer worker first; routine work must not create background host agents. Local workers can receive the active project's dashboard-configured quick, standard, or deep memory and select a RAM-safe 2B/4B/9B/27B model at call time. The router forwards complexity but does not choose the model; prism_infer owns the final decision using memory and context fit, installed models, live RAM, entitlements, and explicit caller overrides.

Codex and Gemini native agent fan-out are disabled during connect. Codex keeps a two-thread, one-level Terra/low fallback profile if the developer explicitly re-enables native agents later. Claude Code keeps native agents as a last-resort path but pins their model to Sonnet. Cursor and Claude Desktop do not expose a supported global subagent-policy file, so they receive the identical workflow through Prism's MCP server instructions. prism_infer safety boundaries and the host's final verification responsibility are unchanged.

Subscription-Tier Skills Arrive Before the First Host Launch

prism connect now downloads the authoritative Synalux skill manifest and materializes entitled packages in the native ~/.agents/skills directory before the command exits. Codex therefore sees the current skillset on its first launch instead of requiring a second restart. Prism rechecks the same snapshot at MCP startup, session load, and every five minutes—skill delivery never depends on a host lifecycle hook.

On the first user turn, Prism's native skill, MCP metadata, and managed host instructions request one session_bootstrap({}) call. Prism then uses the dashboard's developer name, Auto-Load Projects, and quick, standard, or deep setting. The response stays focused on greeting and session state because tier skills are already present in the host's native skill directory.

Hook-free MCP can provide and prioritize that ready-to-display block, but the host model still owns the final assistant message and may summarize it. Prism does not claim a deterministic verbatim greeting on third-party chat surfaces; that would require a host lifecycle hook, launcher, extension, or Prism-owned panel. Context loading itself remains complete even when a host shortens the visible reply.

Free accounts receive only the public hook-free prism-startup package; the MCP server still supplies a compact, non-proprietary safety and evidence contract. Authenticated paid accounts receive the protected behavioral and engineering packages plus the current subscribed routing set. The paid evidence-first-protocol keeps ordinary coding lightweight: one correlated reproduction is enough to begin an edit, while strict acceptance starts only before a completion claim, push, or release and inspects only the exact artifacts used as proof. Upgrades install newly entitled packages; verified downgrades remove only Prism-owned packages while preserving local skills and locally modified conflicts.

When upgrading an older Claude Code installation, prism connect removes only the exact Prism-owned startup, skill-sync, handoff, and drift hook actions from the legacy bootstrap. It also removes the recognized legacy Prism startup sections from ~/CLAUDE.md, preserves every other instruction, and installs a small ownership-marked native block that selects session_bootstrap({}) on the first turn. User hooks, custom instruction sections, and near matches remain untouched; native skills and server-side reminders preserve those Prism features without depending on host lifecycle hooks. On Claude Code and Codex connect additionally registers the prism-route script twice: on every prompt (mid-session skill routing) and on SessionStart matched to compact only (post-compaction protected-floor digest). Because hosts expose no native session-end callback, handoff at shutdown is instruction-driven rather than a guaranteed lifecycle event.

After Claude Code's native user registration succeeds, the same default or --refresh command checks the nearest .mcp.json from the current directory through the home directory. It removes only the exact legacy prism-mcp entry { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "prism-mcp-server"] } that would otherwise shadow the user registration. Custom Prism entries and their additional fields, plus unrelated servers, are preserved; malformed files fail loud without changes. --dry-run reports the recognized migration without changing the file.

What's New in v20.2.1

Subscription-Aware Memory Storage

prism connect now carries an explicit PRISM_STORAGE=auto|local|synalux|supabase into every managed host registration and rejects invalid values before changing a config file. In auto, a portal-confirmed free tier uses local SQLite, while Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise use Synalux cloud memory. If entitlement resolution is unavailable, Prism fails closed instead of splitting history across backends. Storage remains independent of local-first model routing.

What's New in v20.2.0

One Command Connects Every Supported Host

Install Prism globally and run prism connect. It detects Claude Code, Claude Desktop on macOS, Windows, and Linux (beta), Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex, then safely registers the server from the installed package. Existing custom entries are untouched; --dry-run previews changes and --refresh updates only Prism-managed entries.

What's New in v20.1.0

Every Inference Outcome Is Now Observable

prism_infer gains a failure contract: pass escalation: "report" and every call returns a structured gate_outcome — success, degraded (gate-failed output served anyway, explicitly flagged), or refused (typed, with reason, instead of a thrown error). Degraded output can no longer serve silently.

Big Prompts Work Locally

Prompts over 4000 chars were blanket-refused when cloud was off. Now the full text gets a deterministic reserved-keyword scan plus a head+middle+tail excerpt classification — clean oversize prompts serve locally with a distinct UNCERTAIN_LENGTH audit marker. Clinical/reserved handling is unchanged (and its keyword floor got stronger).

No More Silent Truncation

Tier context limits now match the live Modelfiles (27b/9b are 4096-token models; 4b/2b are 32768 — the old table had it backwards). Tiers that can't hold your prompt are skipped with a visible ctx_insufficient reason; if nothing fits, you get the full prompt on cloud or a loud error — never an answer computed from a silently-clipped prompt.

Know Which Plan You're Actually Running Under

Entitlements carry a source field: portal (real), unconfigured (free by design), or fallback_free (portal unreachable — free limits ASSUMED). Pass strict_entitlements: true to fail loud instead of running degraded.

What's New in v20.0.8

verify_behavior Works Again

The verify_behavior tool crashed on every call (-32602 expected object, received string) — the handler returned a bare string instead of an MCP CallToolResult object. Fixed, with contract + fail-closed regression tests so the safety gate can never silently break again. If you're on 20.0.6/20.0.7, update.

From v20.0.7: Reserved-Content Safety, Skills Auth, Delegation Metrics

Reserved clinical content is now Claude-or-refuse (never served by a smaller model than the one that refused it), skill delivery gained a JWT auth fallback (paid-tier skills now reach machines using only PRISM_SYNALUX_API_KEY), and every prism_infer call is recorded in a persistent infer_metrics ledger. Full details in CHANGELOG.md.

What's New in v20.0.5

Local-First Delegation — 15 Categories, Measured Rate

The local-inference-first skill covers 15 hard-trigger categories (code gen, regex, format conversion, summarization, documentation, factual lookup, classification, shell commands, config gen, and more). Pasted code blocks now trigger delegation regardless of question phrasing. Measured delegation rate: 30-35% on engineering sessions, 40-60% on transform/content sessions. Rate depends on prompt mix, not the skill — the instruments now self-validate with nonDelegatedCount to prevent curated-set tautologies.

Think-Only Retry (v20.0.4)

Qwen 3.5 models (9B/27B) with thinking enabled could burn all tokens on <think> blocks and return empty content, causing a cascade to 4B. Now detects think-only responses and retries the same tier with thinking disabled — preserving model quality instead of falling to a smaller model.

What's New in v20.0.3

Layer 1 Cold-Model Resilience

(As shipped in an earlier release; the current contract is the header of src/utils/layer1.ts.) The reserved-category classifier retries once with a longer timeout on cold-model failure, then falls back to a deterministic keyword backstop; keyword-clean text is served locally. Over-length prompts (>4K chars) get the full-text keyword floor plus a head+middle+tail excerpt read and a distinct UNCERTAIN_LENGTH marker — prompt padding cannot force the ERROR branch. This eliminates the cold-start refusal problem without weakening the safety gate.

Keyword Backstop for Reserved Content

When the LLM classifier fails (timeout, injection, resource pressure), a deterministic regex floor catches reserved vocabulary (restraint, seclusion, self-harm, suicide, overdose, crisis de-escalation, etc.) including inflected and verb forms. Blocks prompt-padding and classifier-injection attacks on the ERROR path.

Single-Source Safety Text

The safety statement in the MCP server instructions field now imports from boundaries.ts — one source of truth instead of two hand-maintained copies. Boundaries version bumped to v3 with an explicit delivery decision documented in code.

Reserved-Category Safety Gate — All Tiers (v20.0.2)

The Layer 1 semantic classifier now runs for every user, not just paid tiers. Reserved clinical content is refused on free tier when cloud is unavailable — fail-closed.

Ledger Dedup (v20.0.2)

session_save_ledger deduplicates identical entries within a 5-minute window.

Evidence Script (v20.0.2)

scripts/generate-evidence.sh regenerates all 5 evidence files with built-in assertions. Run bash scripts/generate-evidence.sh to verify the full pipeline.

What's New in v20.0.0

License: AGPL-3.0 → Apache-2.0

Prism MCP is now Apache-2.0. The thin-client architecture means all proprietary value (skill resolution, tier gating, billing, cloud inference) lives server-side — the open client carries no moat to protect. Apache-2.0 removes the enterprise adoption friction that AGPL caused.

Thin Client Architecture

Skill routing, budget management, and content resolution have moved server-side to the Synalux portal. The MCP client is now a thin API caller — simpler, smaller, and portable across any host (Claude Code, Gemini, Cursor, autonomous scripts). Offline fallback reads the last successful response from local SQLite.

Clean-Room Voyage AI Adapter

The Voyage AI embedding adapter was independently reimplemented from the Voyage API docs to ensure 100% project-owned copyright. Default model updated to voyage-3.5. See PROVENANCE.md for details.

Server-Side Drift Detection

Session drift detection (GATE 5) no longer requires Claude Code hooks. The timer runs server-side per conversation, piggybacked on every MCP tool response. Works for any host.

CLA Requirement

External contributions now require signing the Individual CLA. The CLA check is merge-blocking on the main branch.

Quickstart

The free tier needs no account, no API key, and no cloud. Install Prism, then register it with every supported MCP host already installed on your machine:

npm install --global prism-mcp-server
prism connect

prism connect detects Claude Code, Claude Desktop (macOS/Windows/Linux), Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex. Use prism connect --all to target all five, --host <name> for one host, or --dry-run to preview the files that would change. Existing prism and prism-mcp entries are never overwritten by default. --refresh updates only an entry previously created by Prism; custom entries remain untouched. For Claude Code, both the default command and --refresh also remove the exact legacy project-scoped npx -y prism-mcp-server entry from the effective ancestor .mcp.json after the native user registration succeeds. No custom or near-match project entry is changed. Close the target MCP hosts before a non-dry-run registration so they cannot edit their configuration at the same time.

The same connection installs the local-first orchestration contract:

All five receive PRISM_AGENT_POLICY=local-first in their managed Prism MCP entry. Routine tasks use the RAM-aware local worker; native/background fan-out is not the default workflow. session_task_route supplies a complexity hint; prism_infer remains the single owner of model and thinking selection and can choose 27B when its viability gates support it.

Set PRISM_STORAGE before running prism connect to preserve an explicit storage choice in the generated host entries. This does not change local-model routing; Synalux cloud storage separately requires an active cloud-memory entitlement.

Codex registration preserves unrelated ~/.codex/config.toml content, appends only the marked Prism MCP block, and updates only the documented local-first feature/agent keys. CODEX_HOME is respected when set and must already exist, matching Codex's own contract. Restart Codex CLI, the IDE extension, or the ChatGPT desktop app after connecting.

Restart the connected host and your agent now has memory backed by a local SQLite database (~/.prism-mcp/data.db). See IDE setup for manual configuration and host-specific paths.

Optional — local model fleet for offline tool-routing. Pull whichever fits your hardware:

ollama pull dcostenco/prism-coder:2b    # 3.3 GB  · on-device / lowest RAM · sees images (100% on our routing suite)
ollama pull dcostenco/prism-coder:4b    # 3.5 GB  · verifier · sees images (100%)
ollama pull dcostenco/prism-coder:9b    # 6.7 GB  · default router · sees images (95.7%, reasons before answering)
ollama pull dcostenco/prism-coder:27b   # 16.8 GB · complex code / quality · text only (100%)

Prism detects both the namespaced (dcostenco/prism-coder:9b) and bare (prism-coder:9b) Ollama tags automatically.

The 2b/4b/9b tiers carry a vision tower and accept screenshots through prism_infer({ images: [...] }) — pass absolute paths or base64. Image requests are refused rather than answered blind when no tier (or the Layer 1 safety classifier) can actually see the image, so a text-only model is never handed a prompt about a screenshot it never received. The 27b is text only.

Optional oMLX for local coding

Use Settings → Local Coding in prism dashboard for opt-in installation, progress, retry, connection checks, and backend/model selection. Or use prism local install followed by prism local start. npm installation never downloads models automatically. The managed pack requires Apple Silicon, macOS 15+, Python 3.11–3.13, 32 GiB memory and 40 GiB free disk; it keeps existing servers and jobs running. Auto prefers configured oMLX for eligible coding; explicit smaller model ceilings stay on Ollama, and task overrides take priority.

For manual setup, install the Prism integration of oMLX, its required 9B classifier, and a drafting model such as Qwen3.8-27B oQ4e. Set a loopback API key, enable chunked prefill, disable MTP/DFlash/speculative prefill, and configure model context/thinking budgets. Then verify a call with local_backend: "omlx", mode: "code", and the exact advertised local_model. Ollama need not be running; Prism refuses device contention without unloading another job's models.

Follow the step-by-step oMLX guide for pinned install/download commands, server startup, a first MCP call, and troubleshooting. Its tested model table separates native oMLX checkpoints from the experimental Strata GGUF runtime. The coding and review results show measured trade-offs and limits; they do not establish an overall winner. Stock oMLX cannot serve this Prism path, and explicit oMLX has no inference fallback. Local reviews remain advisory.

What it does

Your AI agent forgets everything between sessions. Prism fixes that — and adds verification, drift detection, and multi-agent coordination on top.

Mind Palace — persistent memory that survives across sessions

Every conversation feeds a persistent store. The next session loads the right context automatically — no re-explaining. The dashboard shows your current project state, pending TODOs, intent health, and a neural knowledge graph — all built automatically from your agent sessions.

It runs on loopback and is gated by a local token by default — run prism dashboard to open it without signing in. This local browser step is not a Free-plan redemption. Requests with an untrusted Host/Origin are refused, closing the DNS-rebinding exposure fixed in GHSA-9cvx-7x8q-3g6m. See docs/IDE_SETUP.md to pin the token, disable it, or configure Basic Auth / JWKS.

Export — read the record outside the agent

session_export_memory writes your memory out as plain files you can read, diff, and commit. Nothing goes through a model to produce it.

markdown   human-readable — drop it in a PR to show what the agent actually did
json       machine-readable — import into another Prism instance
vault      zipped Markdown with YAML frontmatter and [[wikilinks]] (Obsidian, Logseq)

This is the surface to reach for when you want to answer "did the agent verify this, or is it claiming it did?" — the export is a record you review after the fact, in a diff or a pull request, rather than a live view you have to go and open. The same data is available from the dashboard's Export ZIP and Export Vault buttons.

Knowledge Graph — semantic + keyword + graph search

Ask "what did I decide about the auth flow last month?" and get an answer with citations, combining vector similarity, full-text search, and graph traversal.

Session History — immutable audit trail

Every session is logged with files changed, decisions made, and TODOs. Search, filter, and replay any past session.

Inference Metrics — see where your tokens go

Every prism_infer call tracks which model handled it (local Ollama vs cloud) and how many tokens were consumed. When you save a session, Prism shows a summary:

📊 Inference Metrics (this session):
  Total calls: 12 — Local: 10 (83%) | Cloud: 2 (17%)
  Prompt tokens: 7,840 evaluated / 8,420 submitted est.
  Completion tokens: 3,150
  Cloud tokens saved (est.): 11,570 — token volume handled locally instead of cloud
  Avg latency: 1,240ms
  By model:
    prism-coder:27b: 6 calls, 7,200 tokens, avg 1,800ms
    prism-coder:9b: 4 calls, 2,870 tokens, avg 620ms
    synalux-27b: 2 calls, 1,500 tokens, avg 1,100ms

Cloud tokens saved is the honest routing metric — it accrues only when local Ollama handles a call that would otherwise have gone to Synalux cloud inference. A compact version appears inline after every 5th prism_infer call: `📊 local 10 (83%) · cloud 2 (17%) · ~11,570 tok · avg 1,240