This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/selfhosted by /u/BaseMac on 2025-07-08 14:05:40+00:00.
I've been totally fixated on the continuity problem with AI since I started working with it last year. Like everyone, I wanted to open each new conversation with a shared understanding of everything I'd ever discussed with Claude or Chat. I was constantly asking them to summarize conversations so I could paste them into the next chat. It was a pain in the ass, and each new conversation felt like a bad copy of the original. It wasn't just the content of the conversations that felt lost, it was the texture of it, the way we talked to one another.
Claude (my favorite LLM by a mile) doesn't have "memory" in the way that ChatGPT does, but it hardly matters because for anything more than remembering a few facts about you, Chat's memory basically sucks. What it remembers feels arbitrary. And even when you say, "Hey, remember this" it remembers it the way IT wants to in a file you can delete by scrolling through all its memories in a buried setting, but you can't edit them.
My friend Paul was having the same frustration at the same time. We were talking about it every time we hung out, and eventually he started building a solution for us to use. Once he had a working prototype, we met with amazing results right away.
What started as a personal tool has grown into this free, open source project called Basic Memory that actually works.
If you follow AI at all, you've heard a lot about Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. Basic Memory is a set of tools used via MCP. In a nutshell, users connect it to their Claude Desktop (or Claude Code), and whatever notes app they like that handles Markdown. We use Obsidian. Basic Memory takes detailed notes on your AI interactions that you two can reference in the future. Imagine a stenographer sitting in on all your chats writing notes about everything that's said and saving them locally, on your computer, Everything stays on your machine in standard Markdown files - your AI conversation data never touches the cloud..
But what's really cool is that it's a two-way street. You can edit the notes, Claude can edit the notes, he can create new ones, and you can too. All of them become part of your shared memory and what he draws on for every future conversation. Then whenever you want to revisit an old conversation or project, Claude reads your shared notes, almost all of which he wrote himself in language both of you can understand.
It's completely self-contained. No external dependencies for data storage, no API keys for the memory system itself, no cloud services required. Just local files you control.
The difference is night and day. Instead of starting from scratch every time, Claude picks up exactly where we left off, even weeks or months later. Research projects actually build on themselves now instead of resetting with every conversation.
I made a (super basic, kind of awful) video showing how it works in practice. I'd love it if you check it out. We have a growing Discord community with a collection of avid users who have built wild new workflows around Basic Memory. It's been pretty cool seeing how people use it in ways that are way more sophisticated than anything we originally imagined. If you're working with AI regularly, it really does unlock so much more.
It's worth checking out if the context loss problem drives you as crazy as it drove us. I think you'll find it really helps.
Links:
· GitHub repo (AGPL, completely free)
· Installation guide
· Discord
