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fable

Your Claude already has a memory. fable unlocks it.

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Every conversation you've ever had with Claude Code is already saved on your machine — every decision, every debugging hunt, every 2 AM breakthrough, word for word. Claude just isn't allowed to use it.

Mid-session, compaction builds a wall: everything behind it is locked away to save tokens, and Claude carries on with a thin summary. /clear wipes the slate. And after 30 days, Claude Code quietly deletes the files themselves. Your project's real memory — locked, then destroyed, by design.

Everyone else sells you a replacement memory: summaries, extracted facts, vector stores. fable does something different — it unlocks the real one.

pipx install git+https://github.com/grooverLab/fable
fable discover      # every conversation you ever had — unlocked, in seconds
fable serve         # browse your memory in a dashboard

100% local · no API keys · no cloud · no daemons. Your conversations never leave your machine.

• Ask about past conversations with Claude — get the real answer. "What did we decide about auth last month?" Claude searches its own history mid-session (via MCP) and quotes the actual transcript — not a summary, not an extracted "fact." The conversation itself.
• The wall stops costing you. fable catalogs everything before compaction walls it off, and hands back exactly what Claude lost — on demand, under a token budget you set.
• The 30-day deletion becomes irrelevant. Sealed into a local vault, byte-identical, for as long as you decide.

First of its kind — five things no other tool does

🧵 Composed Sessions. Hand-pick conversations from any project, any month — put them in your order — and fable builds a brand-new session that Claude resumes as its own lived history. A workspace with curated memory. (Empirically verified: restitched sessions resume cleanly, signatures intact.)

🕰️ File time-travel. Your transcripts accidentally versioned everything. fable reconstructs every file's edit history — every Edit and Write Claude ever made, across every session — with side-by-side comparison between any two moments of a file's life, and a jump back to the conversation that made each change. (fable file src/loader.py)

✂️ Transcript Surgery. Your 80 MB session is paying rent on dead threads. Remove whole conversations — fable re-stitches the timeline, shows you the simulation first, and keeps every removed byte recallable forever. Reversible by construction.

🪶 Pruning that loses nothing. Slim every message (tool noise, images, bloat) before resuming a heavy session — with an itemized preview of the savings, and the original sealed in the vault first.

🔍 Memory Diff. See exactly what any prune or cleanup cost any conversation — generation by generation, byte by byte. Nobody else can even show you what was lost.

How it works (the short version)

fable indexes your transcripts into a local SQLite archive: an immutable vault (every byte, forever) plus a search map (keyword + semantic, optional local embeddings via Ollama). Hooks run before Claude Code's compaction and cleanup; an MCP server gives Claude search / recall / remember tools. Measured on a real archive — 191,000 records, 6,000 conversations:

recall@1	recall@5	search (p50)	full re-index
76.7%	90.0%	135 ms	6.6 s

Reproduce it: python3 scripts/benchmark.py. No competitor publishes retrieval numbers.

Why fable — and not another memory layer

	fable	claude-mem	mem0 / Letta	native Claude Code
Memory = your actual conversations	✅	❌ summaries	❌ fact snippets	⚠️ locked behind the wall
Survives the 30-day deletion & /clear	✅	⚠️ its summaries do	❌	❌
Claude searches its own history (MCP)	✅	✅	❌	❌
Composed sessions / file time-travel / surgery / diff	✅ first of its kind	❌	❌	❌
Zero API keys, fully offline	✅	✅	❌	✅
Footprint	one SQLite file	Node + Chroma daemon	cloud / Docker	—

(Fair is fair: mem0 fits multi-LLM production agents; ccusage goes deeper on billing analytics. Different jobs, both compatible with fable.)

Trusted the hard way

fable's first user is the session that built it: mid-build, that session was pruned by fable (7.8 MB → 3.0 MB), kept working through compaction via its own hook, and is now searchable through its own MCP server — and fable file fable/recall.py replays its own source code being written, 18 versions deep. The build history eats its own dogfood — all $83k of API-equivalent work in the author's archive included.

What people use it for

• "Why did we choose X?" — architecture archaeology, weeks later
• "When did this function break?" — file time-travel to the exact edit and the conversation around it
• Picking up a debugging hunt exactly where the wall cut it off
• A composed "workspace" session: threads from three projects, one memory
• Slimming a heavy session before --resume, reversibly
• fable remember "we deploy Fridays only" — standing rules, every session

Try it on a fictional sample first: python3 demo/seed_demo.py && fable --db demo/demo.db serve

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MIT · local-first forever (non-goals) · built with Claude Code, for Claude Code · @claude answers issues here — the butler is Claude · architecture deep-dive ·