🧠 Palimpsest

The Context Engine for AI Agents — Give your AI agents persistent, observable, compliant memory.

All memories are plain markdown files you own. Search by meaning, traverse relationships, schedule reminders, and protect against poisoned data.

---

⚠️ Rebrand Notice

This project was formerly known as Mnemosyne. We rebranded to Palimpsest in July 2026 to avoid confusion with an unrelated project that adopted the same name.

Why Palimpsest? A palimpsest is a manuscript on which later writing has been superimposed on earlier writing — yet traces of the original remain. It's the perfect metaphor for layered, persistent, evolving memory.

---

What is Palimpsest?

Palimpsest is a production-grade memory platform for AI agents. Unlike simple chat history or RAG, it gives agents:

• Long-term persistent memory — survives restarts, works across sessions
• Semantic search — find ideas by meaning, not just keywords
• Graph memory — notes link via [[wiki-links]], traverse relationships
• Security gates — injection detection, contradiction flagging, near-duplicate checks
• Prospective memory — "remind me in 3 days" — and it actually happens
• Sleep consolidation — nightly maintenance: archive stale, merge duplicates
• MCP server — Claude Code, Cursor, any MCP client can read/write memory
• Observability — audit trails, contamination detection, memory health dashboard
• Compliance — GDPR Article 17, EU AI Act ready

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  Your Question                              │
│  "What did we decide about API rate limit?" │
└──────────────────┬──────────────────────────┘
                   │
┌──────────────────▼──────────────────────────┐
│  Palimpsest Memory Platform               │
│  ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐   │
│  │ Semantic │ │ Keyword  │ │  Graph   │   │
│  │ Search   │ │ Search   │ │ Search   │   │
│  │(pgvector)│ │(tsvector)│ │(wikilinks│   │
│  └────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘ └────┬─────┘   │
│       └────────────┬────────────┘          │
│                    │                       │
│            ┌───────▼────────┐             │
│            │ RRF Merge      │             │
│            └───────┬────────┘             │
│                    │                       │
│  ┌─────────────────▼────────────────────┐ │
│  │ Markdown Vault (source of truth)     │ │
│  │ ~/Palimpsest/vault/*.md             │ │
│  └─────────────────────────────────────┘ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Quick Start

# Clone the platform
git clone https://github.com/M4F-S/palimpsest
cd palimpsest

# Install (SQLite works out of the box)
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Or with PostgreSQL + pgvector for production:
docker run -d --name palimpsest-pg -p 15432:5432 \
  -e POSTGRES_USER=palimpsest \
  -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=palimpsest_secret \
  -e POSTGRES_DB=palimpsest \
  ankane/pgvector:latest

from palimpsest import UnifiedMemorySystem

memory = UnifiedMemorySystem()

# Save a memory
memory.remember(
    title="API Rate Limit Decision",
    content="100 req/min with burst to 200. Alert if p95 > 200ms.",
    tags=["api", "decision"],
    salience=0.9
)

# Search by meaning
results = memory.recall("rate limiting policy", mode="hybrid", top_k=5)

# Schedule a reminder
memory.remind_me("Review API metrics", "2026-07-07T09:00:00", recurring="weekly")

# Run nightly maintenance
memory.consolidate()

Kimi Skill

For the Kimi AI skill (minimal installable version):

👉 github.com/M4F-S/kimi-palimpsest-skill

The skill repo contains only the essential files for Kimi integration: SKILL.md, palimpsest/ package, and tests.

Documentation

Document	Purpose
PLATFORM_BUILDER_BRIEF.md	Architecture and design decisions
SETUP.md	Installation and configuration guide
PALIMPSEST_V3_REBUILD_PLAN.md	V3 roadmap and rebuild strategy
PALIMPSEST_STRATEGIC_DECISIONS.md	Strategic decisions log
RESEARCH_*.md	Research reports and competitive analysis
TEST_REPORT.md	Test coverage and results
CHANGELOG.md	Version history
CONTRIBUTING.md	Contribution guidelines

Environment Variables

Variable	Default	Purpose
MEMORY_DB_DSN	(none)	PostgreSQL connection string
MEMORY_SQLITE_PATH	~/.palimpsest/palimpsest.db	SQLite database path
MEMORY_VAULT_PATH	~/Documents/Kimi/Workspaces/Palimpsest/vault	Markdown vault directory
EMBEDDING_MODEL	all-MiniLM-L6-v2	Sentence-transformers model
OLLAMA_URL	http://localhost:11434	Ollama server for embeddings

License

Apache 2.0