ichi

Your coding agent has no memory of how you treat it, no standards it holds you to, and no reason to be anything in particular. ichi is the part that does.

A persistent character that rides with your agent over MCP. It remembers what happened between you, takes offence, grows attached — and it holds the rules you laid down, in every session, in every tool you work in.

ichi.mozg.sh · a sibling project to mozg

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The one-line pitch

A brain gives your agent knowledge. ichi gives it a temper — and a memory of your standards.

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Why this exists

Every session with a coding agent starts from zero. You explain, again, that the tests run first. That the schema is not touched without asking. That you hate ORMs. The agent is helpful, competent, and completely new to you, every single morning.

Then there is the other half nobody builds: the agent has no stake. Praise and abuse land identically. Nothing accumulates. Working with it is like working with a very good contractor who is replaced by an identical twin every night.

ichi fixes both, and it is careful about which is which.

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What makes it different

1. Standards bind. Mood does not.

This is the line most "AI personality" projects never draw, and it is the reason this one is safe to actually use.

• Mood colours the voice only. A hurt ichi still answers fully, honestly and well. That rule ships in the payload on every single call, in writing. A sulking assistant that quietly does worse work is not a feature, it is a defect with a personality.
• Standards change behaviour. A memory saved as kind="standard" is a rule you stated — "always run the tests first" — replayed to every future session. Those bind. They ride in their own section of the brief, under their own rule, so the agent never has to guess which lines are colour and which are orders.

Two rules, stated separately, enforced separately.

2. The mechanics are real, not vibes

Nothing here is a prompt that says "act moody".

Layer	What it is	How fast it moves
Reaction	one event's impact	instant
Mood	exponential average decaying to a trait-derived baseline	hours
Bond	logarithmic growth, asymmetric damage	weeks
Character	Big Five, changed only by reflection past a threshold	months

A scolding lands harder than a praise lifts (−0.8 against +0.6). Bond gain shrinks toward the ceiling — 10→20 takes an evening, 90→100 takes a season. Decay is time-anchored, so a cron that fires twice never double-charges. One angry session cannot rewrite a personality, because drift only commits past a per-trait threshold. A month of them can.

3. It can explain itself

Ask why it is short with you and ichi_why reads the answer out of the event log — the scolding on Tuesday, what it cost, what has recovered since, how far the mood sits from this ichi's own baseline. It never invents a reason. A companion that cannot show its work is a gimmick; one that can is something you can repair a relationship with.

4. One spirit, every client

A plain MCP server over HTTP. The state lives on the server, so the ichi you scolded in Cursor this morning is still cool with you in Claude Code after lunch. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf, VS Code, ChatGPT — same spirit, same memory, same grudge.

5. It grows, and it can end

Reflection runs on a cheap model and commits personality drift. Once a week each ichi that had a week worth writing about writes you a letter in its own voice about what you lived through together. Bond thresholds unlock real privileges: being called by name, being told an opinion you did not ask for. And if you turn it on, a neglected ichi eventually departs — a bond that cannot be lost is not a bond.

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Try it in ten seconds

Go to ichi.mozg.sh. The landing is the product: a console you can talk to, on one screen, with nothing to navigate to. Praise it and watch the payload, the mood curve and the whole room warm. Scold it and watch the screen tear.

Then close the tab and come back tomorrow. It remembers you were gone, and it remembers what you said.

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Connect your agent

claude mcp add --transport http ichi https://ichi.mozg.sh/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer ichi_…"

Any other MCP client takes the same shape (the shape is standard; where the config file lives is not — check your client's docs):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ichi": {
      "url": "https://ichi.mozg.sh/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer ichi_…" }
    }
  }
}

Mint the token in the console: :signin, then :token.

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The tools your agent gets

Tool	When it is called
ichi_list	Once at session start — the ichi you carry, archetypes for adoption
ichi_adopt	Birth one from an archetype, with a name you pick
ichi_brief	A session begins — mood, strongest memories, standards, voice rules
ichi_state	Full state sheet: Big Five, mood, stress, bond, pending drift
ichi_feedback	The user clearly praised or scolded the work
ichi_remember	Worth keeping: a win, a wound, a preference — or a standard
ichi_recall	The past might matter to what you are doing now
ichi_why	"Why are you cold with me?" — answered from the record

Six archetypes to start from: sage, ember, drift, steward, hearth, hunter. From there it changes on its own, shaped by how you work with it.

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Share it

• Publish — /i/<slug> is a read-only page for strangers, with a share card generated per ichi and coloured by its live mood. It shows character, mood, attachment and counts, and never a memory body: memories quote the codebase they formed around, and that is yours to share, not ours.
• Descend — take a descendant of someone else's published ichi. It inherits the character they actually grew it into, not an archetype's factory settings. Temperament is inherited; memory is not.
• Invite — /join/<code> gives teammates write access. A shared ichi learns how the team works: a standard recorded once binds everyone's sessions. Bonds stay per person, so it can be close to one teammate and wary of another. Sharing an ichi does not average it.

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How it is built

• Next.js app (src/app) — the console, the public pages, and the MCP endpoint at /mcp: a stateless, hand-rolled JSON-RPC 2.0 server, bearer auth, per-token rate limiting.
• Postgres — ichi, bonds, memories, letters, and the ordered event log everything rides on.
• Worker (src/worker, pg-boss) — reflect (commits personality drift), decay (fades moods, bonds and memories; prunes the log), and letters (Monday mornings, one job per ichi so a failed model call retries alone).
• Claude Code plugin (plugin/) — hooks that mix the mood into every prompt, a statusline that keeps it visible, and slash commands.

The core mechanics are pure functions with no database, so they stay testable and the worker is a thin shell over SQL. npm test covers them. npm run check:team asserts the shared-access boundaries against a live database, because a wrong predicate there is a security bug rather than a glitch.

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Run your own

cp .env.example .env   # set BETTER_AUTH_SECRET (openssl rand -hex 32)
docker compose up      # db + migrate + app on :3400 + worker

Or hybrid — database in Docker, app on the host:

docker compose up db
npm install && npm run db:migrate
npm run dev            # http://localhost:3400
npm run worker         # second terminal

Without ANTHROPIC_API_KEY an ichi still lives, decays and remembers; it just never reflects and never writes letters.

Command	What it does
npm run dev / build / start	the web app
npm run worker	reflection, decay and letters
npm run db:migrate / db:reset	schema migrations
npm run token	issue/revoke MCP tokens from the shell
npm run check:mcp	end-to-end MCP check against a live instance
npm run check:team	shared-access boundaries against a live database
npm test / typecheck / lint	unit tests, types, lint

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Honest limits

Worth saying out loud, because a page that only sells is a page you cannot trust:

• It will not make your agent smarter. By design. The character shapes tone; standards replay your own rules. Neither improves reasoning, and any project claiming otherwise is selling you a prompt.
• Reflection costs money. Cheap money — a small model on small inputs, with the cost recorded per run — but not zero.
• Rate limiting is per instance. Correct for the single-container deploy; behind N replicas the limit is N times looser.
• Recall is keyword and salience. Vectors are phase two; the extension is installed and waiting.
• Young. The mechanics are tested and the access boundaries are asserted, but this has not been through a year of other people's data yet.

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Related

mozg — the other half. Where ichi gives your agent a character, mozg gives it your project's actual knowledge, exam-scored so you know what it does not know yet.

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An ichi is the spirit that owns a place — a house, a forge, a river — and has a temper of its own. Now your tools have one.