engRAM

Superior agentic memory, encrypted at rest.

engRAM is the memory your AI agents plug into. Hermes, Claude, and OpenClaw each register in one command; anything that runs a subprocess can use the CLI. Every agent can share the same memory - even across different machines. Everything is local. The default install never touches the network: the embedding model ships inside the package, so recall works as soon as the vault is open. Every byte at rest is AEAD-encrypted, the vectors included. The vault locks itself on restart or power loss and unlocks once per boot.

An engram is the physical trace a memory leaves in the brain. This one lives in RAM: the whole index is held in memory, which is what makes it both the fastest place to search and the safest place to keep plaintext, because nothing decrypted is ever written to disk.

Why engRAM

Most memory tools ask you to choose: powerful, or private, or easy. engRAM refuses the trade, because one design decision delivers all three.

Better recall. engRAM does not just store chat, it decides what matters. A bare "OK" answering "send this reply to the client?" is captured as a consent decision, with its question, at the highest priority. What you said about yourself and your machine outranks background noise. Search is hybrid (meaning plus keywords) and, at personal scale, mathematically exact: the top result is the true top result, not an approximation. It learns you first, and forgets nothing.

More secure, by construction. Every byte at rest is authenticated- encrypted, the embedding vectors included (most tools leave those in the clear, and vectors can be inverted back toward text). Deletion is cryptographic: destroy the record's key and it is gone, unrecoverable. Tampering is detected, history is hash-chained, and the vault locks itself on restart or power loss. It runs fully offline: a runtime guard aborts on any network attempt, and CI proves it on three operating systems.

Not one step harder. One command installs it, creates the vault, and wires your agent. No API key, no cloud account, no daemon. Unlock when you want to use it; lock when you want it closed. By default an unlock stays open for weeks (until restart or you lock it), like any app you leave running. The security is free at the point of use because it falls out of the architecture, not out of your patience: keeping plaintext off disk forces the index into RAM, and a RAM-resident index is also the fastest one there is. Secure and fast are the same choice here, and neither costs you a configuration step.

Install

One command per platform. Each installs the package, creates your encrypted vault, and wires the agent.

Claude (Code + Desktop) - macOS / Linux:

pip install engram-vault && engram init && engram integrate claude

Windows (PowerShell):

py -m pip install engram-vault; engram init; engram integrate claude

Registers the MCP server with the Claude Code CLI (user scope, all projects), prints the Claude Desktop config block, and prints the one-line CLAUDE.md instruction that makes Claude treat engRAM as its memory.

Hermes - macOS / Linux:

pip install engram-vault && engram init && engram integrate hermes

Windows (PowerShell):

py -m pip install engram-vault; engram init; engram integrate hermes

Installs the provider plugin, wires the Hermes venv, and runs hermes memory setup engram. engRAM then appears in the hermes memory setup picker beside hindsight and mem0, the only entry marked "no setup needed": no API key, no cloud account, no daemon. Verify with hermes memory status. See everything Hermes remembers at any time with engram dash - one command, and the vault opens in your browser (memories by kind, growth, the relation graph, live search); Ctrl-C closes it.

OpenClaw - macOS / Linux:

pip install engram-vault && engram init && engram integrate openclaw

Windows (PowerShell):

py -m pip install engram-vault; engram init; engram integrate openclaw

Writes the mcpServers entry into ~/.openclaw/openclaw.json (with a backup), then: openclaw gateway restart and confirm with openclaw mcp list.

Anything else that speaks MCP gets the same server with one config block; see docs/INTEGRATIONS.md. Until the PyPI release, replace pip install engram-vault with a clone + pip install .; everything else is identical.

Measured, on an 8 GB baseline laptop

Every number below is reproducible on your machine with engram selftest and engram bench.

Metric	Measured
Fresh install → open vault, offline	seconds, zero network
Vector search, 20k records (HNSW)	p95 0.68 ms
Full hybrid search (embed + vector + BM25 + fuse)	p95 8.8 ms
Peak RSS, model + vault + index resident	319 MB
Store one memory (embed + encrypt + fsync journal)	~40 ms
Wheel size, model included	~30 MB
Test suite (crypto, tamper, crash, offline, concurrency, 2FA, graph, dash)	88 tests, ~40 s

A single network round-trip to a cloud memory API costs more than this entire pipeline. The property that makes engRAM secure (no plaintext index ever on disk, so all search is RAM-resident) is the same property that makes it fast: below 20k records search is exact SIMD matrix math, recall = 1.0 by construction; above it, SIMD HNSW at ~99% recall.

The memory logic

Full write-path, decision math, and comparisons in docs/MEMORY.md. The load-bearing ideas:

Nearly everything is stored; nothing important is buried. Only empty turns are dropped. A bare "OK" is not noise, it is a decision: when the agent asks "Want me to send this reply to the client now?" and the user answers "OK", engRAM resolves the question from the conversation and stores [decision 2026-07-20] Approved (answered "OK"): Want me to send this reply to the client now? at the top importance tier. Asking "did the user say to email the client?" later retrieves exactly that record.

Deterministic importance tiers rank recall: decisions/consent 0.90, personal facts and preferences 0.80, the user's machine and configuration 0.75, other substantive statements 0.55, pleasantries 0.20 (kept, ranked last). The fused score is RRF(vector) + RRF(keyword) + 0.02·cosine + 0.006·importance: cosine magnitude keeps the genuinely best match on top, importance settles near-ties in favor of what matters. The agent learns the user and the computer first, the world second, and forgets nothing.

One pinned embedding space. The model's SHA-256 is recorded in the vault and enforced at open; cosine comparisons stay mathematically valid forever instead of silently degrading when a model changes. Migration is explicit: engram reindex --re-embed.

No LLM inside. Embeddings run locally (bundled 384-dim int8 ONNX model, <300 MB RAM). Judgment belongs to the host model you already run, via engram_store / engram_forget; engRAM contributes deterministic capture, encryption, and total recall. That split is what makes the offline guarantee absolute and every decision reproducible. Pair engRAM with an offline LLM and the whole agent stack can run usefully with no network at all.

Agent-native by design

engRAM is built to sit under agents you already use, not as a separate app you babysit.

• Hermes native provider - shows up in hermes memory setup with "no setup needed". Turns sync automatically; search injects only what is relevant, tagged as data not instructions.
• Claude over MCP - one integrate claude step registers the server and gives you the Desktop config block plus a CLAUDE.md line so memory is part of normal work.
• OpenClaw and any MCP client - same stdio server, zero open ports, same tools (memory_search, memory_store, memory_forget, lock).
• A memory graph, not just a memory pile - memory_link records explicit relations (who works where, what belongs to what), with optional validity windows; memory_relations answers entity, predicate, and as-of queries. Deterministic storage, host-model judgment - the same split as everything else in engRAM.
• CLI for everything else - scripts, cron, other agents: engram store, engram search, engram forget, engram link, engram relations, engram lock.
• See the vault: engram dash - one command opens a local page with everything at a glance: how many memories of what kind, growth over time, the relation graph, tags, per-agent counts, live search. Served from RAM, 127.0.0.1-only behind a random URL token, read-only, zero outbound requests, zero configuration.
• Panic lock from the agent - memory_lock / engram lock clears stored credentials instantly when you need the vault closed now.
• One vault, many hosts - Hermes, Claude, and the CLI can share a vault at once; each caller gets its own identity and namespace ACLs.
• One memory, no sections - the starting memories seeded at init live in main as ordinary records, editable and forgettable like anything the agent stores; older vaults reorganize automatically.

Day to day, the point is simple: the agent remembers you, your decisions, and your machine - encrypted, offline, and fast - without a cloud account.

The lock model

You lock and unlock the vault yourself whenever you want. Manual control is always available:

• engram unlock - open the vault with YOUR passphrase. You choose it; engRAM never auto-generates a password, seed, or recovery phrase, and there is no credential it knows that you don't. (Vaults made by older versions that received an auto-generated recovery phrase still open with it.)
• engram lock - close it again and clear every stored credential. Agents can do the same via the memory_lock panic tool.
• engram 2fa enable - optional two-factor unlock: your passphrase (knowledge) plus a keyfile (possession - keep it on a USB stick). Both factors feed Argon2id together, so needing both is enforced by arithmetic, not a policy check; a stolen vault file plus your passphrase still opens nothing without the keyfile. One command, zero configuration: the keyfile's location is remembered, so day-to-day unlocking feels exactly the same while the file is present.

The default unlock mode is convenience, not a cage: after a normal unlock, the vault stays usable across processes, logouts, and logins - for weeks or months if you leave it that way - until the next restart or power loss, or until you lock it yourself. Restart/power loss always locks it: the stored credential is the master key wrapped by a key derived from the kernel's boot timestamp plus the stable machine id; a new boot can never open the old wrap. That is arithmetic, not a policy check.

If you prefer reboot-surviving unlock on macOS, that is an explicit opt-in (engram unlock --keychain), with the tradeoff documented. At any time you can lock, unlock, lock again - on your schedule.

Security, in one paragraph

XChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD on everything at rest including vectors (embedding-inversion resistance) · Argon2id keyslots, LUKS-style, opened only by the user's own passphrase (no auto-generated credentials), optionally two-factor with a keyfile · per-record keys enabling forget --shred (crypto-shred: key destroyed, content mathematically unrecoverable) · fsync'd sealed journal, atomic compaction, verified kill-9 crash recovery · hash-chained tamper-evident audit log (engram audit verify) · per-caller namespace ACLs, quarantine tier for untrusted content, signed vault manifests · stdio MCP transport: zero open ports · runtime offline guard that aborts on any socket attempt; CI runs the whole suite with it active on Linux, macOS, and Windows · no telemetry, ever. Full honest threat model, including what engRAM cannot protect against, in SECURITY.md.

One vault, many agents

Hermes, Claude, and the CLI can share a single vault simultaneously: writes are serialized by an advisory file lock, every process detects foreign writes and reloads, and each host gets its own caller identity and namespace with rw/ro grants. A locked vault is one portable file, safe to move over any channel; engram lock --sign seals it with an Ed25519 manifest the recipient can verify without any credential.

engram lock
scp ~/.engram/memory.vault other-machine:
engram --vault memory.vault unlock     # your passphrase (+ keyfile if 2FA)

Documentation

docs/MEMORY.md	how memory is stored, what gets remembered, why the math wins
docs/INTEGRATIONS.md	selecting engRAM in Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude, everything else
SECURITY.md	full threat model, honest limits
FORMAT.md	byte-level .vault and .mpack specs (language-agnostic)
PACKS.md	authoring and shipping signed memory packs

License

MIT.