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🧠 mnemex

Your second brain, curated by an LLM. Books in, structured wiki out.

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mnemex is a personal knowledge system. You tell an LLM "ingest this book", and it reads the whole thing and files it into a structured, cross-linked wiki of:

• Sources — books, articles, papers (metadata + chapter summaries + extracted claims)
• Entities — the people, companies, and tools mentioned
• Concepts — ideas and frameworks, each with When to use / When NOT to use, cross-links, and a source count
• Syntheses — multi-source theories you derive ("how do these five books on negotiation actually fit together?")

Everything is plain Markdown, version-controlled, locally hosted, and LLM-readable. It's the opposite of RAG: instead of re-discovering knowledge on every query, the wiki compiles knowledge once and keeps it current. Every ingest makes it richer.

Inspired by Karpathy's LLM Wiki idea — made real and turnkey.

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Quick start (≈5 minutes)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Daniil-Sokolskiy/mnemex/main/install.sh | bash

This installs the MCP servers + CLI, scaffolds a wiki at ~/mnemex, and prints setup instructions for your client — Claude Desktop (paste a config block) or Claude Code (run two claude mcp add commands). These are local servers, so the web app (claude.ai) can't use them directly. Wire up your client, then say:

"help me ingest my first book — Meditations by Marcus Aurelius"

Watch index.md grow as the agent reads the book and files it.

<details> <summary>Manual install</summary>

npm install -g @mnemex/library-mcp @mnemex/cli
npx playwright install chromium          # for Anna's Archive search
mnemex init ~/mnemex                  # scaffold the wiki
mnemex doctor                           # verify deps
mnemex mcp install --wiki ~/mnemex    # print setup for Desktop + Claude Code

mnemex mcp install prints copy-paste setup for both Claude Desktop and Claude Code and never edits any config file silently.

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What's in the box

Package	What it is
@mnemex/library-mcp	MCP server to search + download books from Project Gutenberg and Anna's Archive into your wiki. Includes a Playwright-based Anna's search that works against their current client-side-rendered pages (plain HTTP scraping no longer returns results).
@mnemex/cli	mnemex init / doctor / mcp install — scaffold a wiki and wire up the servers.
apps/wiki-template	The starter wiki: CLAUDE.md operating manual, page templates, ingest scripts, empty structure.
search via qmd	mnemex wires up qmd (local BM25 + vector engine) as the mnemex-search MCP server over your wiki. mnemex setup-search installs + indexes it; the agent then has brain.query for hybrid retrieval.

Downloading from Anna's: free vs paid

Search always works and needs no account. Downloading has two paths:

	How	Needs
Free	The search result includes a download_page_url. Open it in your browser and use Anna's free "slow download" (a short wait timer, sometimes a check).	nothing
Automated	library_annas_download fetches the file directly into your wiki, no browser.	a paid Anna's membership — set ANNAS_ARCHIVE_KEY (your account's secret key)

The automated path uses Anna's fast_download API, which requires a membership key — that's Anna's restriction, not mnemex's. Free downloads exist but go through the browser slow-download page (mnemex can't fully automate that: there's a wait timer and occasionally a check, and bypassing checks is out of scope). So without a key you still get every search result plus a one-click link to grab the file for free.

Project Gutenberg downloads are always free and fully automated — no key, no browser.

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How it works

  you: "ingest Atomic Habits"
        │
        ▼
  library-mcp ──► search Gutenberg + Anna's ──► download ──► raw/books/<slug>/book.md
        │
        ▼
  the LLM agent reads CLAUDE.md, then the book, then:
        ├─ writes wiki/sources/Atomic-Habits-Clear-2018.md
        ├─ creates/updates wiki/entities/  (James-Clear, etc.)
        ├─ creates/updates wiki/concepts/  (Habit-Loop, Identity-Based-Habits, …)
        ├─ updates index.md  (counts + catalog)
        └─ appends log.md

The CLAUDE.md in your wiki root is the agent's operating manual — naming conventions, frontmatter schema, the ingest/query/lint workflows, and the relationship vocabulary (Builds on / Subsumes / Contrasted with …).

Methodology

The wiki structure is opinionated. The patterns that make it scale:

• Two-phase ingest — split content writing (sub-agent) from bookkeeping (parent) to avoid timeouts on big books.
• Cluster ingest — ingest 5 themed books together with cross-link "sibling hooks" so concepts mature fast.
• Status lifecycle — stub → draft → mature (3+ sources, reviewed).

Requirements

• Node.js ≥ 20
• pandoc (epub/pdf → markdown)
• Chromium via Playwright (for Anna's search)
• An MCP-capable LLM client (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cowork, …)

⚠️ Legal

library-mcp includes a client for Anna's Archive, which is subject to ongoing legal action. This project hosts and distributes nothing; you are responsible for compliance with copyright law in your jurisdiction. See docs/annas-disclaimer.md. For a fully copyright-clean workflow, use only the Project Gutenberg tools (~70,000 public-domain texts).

Contributing

PRs welcome — see docs/contributing.md. The Anna's DOM parser in packages/library-mcp/src/annas.ts needs occasional updates when Anna's changes its markup; that's the most common maintenance task.

License

MIT