how-it-works

How claude-mem works What it does Every Read, Edit, and Bash that Claude makes turns into a compressed observation. Observations get summarized at session end. Relevant ones get auto-injected into future prompts so the next session starts with context from the last one — no re-explaining the codebase, no re-discovering decisions. When it kicks in Memory injection starts on your second session in a project. The first session in a fresh project seeds memory; subsequent sessions receive auto-injected context for relevant past work. Run /learn-codebase if you want to front-load the entire repo into memory in a single pass (~5 minutes, optional). Where data lives Everything stays in ~/.claude-mem on this machine. Nothing leaves your machine except calls to whichever AI provider you configured for compression (Claude / OpenRouter / Gemini). The SQLite database, vector index, logs, and settings all live under that directory and are removed cleanly on npx claude-mem uninstall .