Open-source memory for coding agents, synced over SSH

Claude Code, Codex, opencode, aider, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Antigravity and Grok Build write every conversation to local files — gigabytes of debugged problems and design decisions you can't search. deja is a zero-dependency binary that turns those histories into a memory layer:

Search	deja "connection pool exhausted" — 7–9 ms over gigabytes, retroactive: months of logs from before you installed it
Agent recall	MCP recall tool — the agent answers "we fixed this three weeks ago" instead of re-debugging, across harnesses
Auto-recall	install --auto adds a SessionStart hook: relevant memory lands in context before you ask
Redaction	API keys, JWTs, private keys are stripped at index time — the cache is safe to keep
Stats	deja stats — your agent work, wrapped: harnesses, top projects, activity sparkline
Share	deja share <id> — hand a colleague a sanitized digest of a session, secrets already scrubbed
Sync	deja sync export/import — move memory between machines, append-only, idempotent

One binary. No models to download, no services to run, nothing leaves your machine unless you sync or share it. (opencode and Cursor IDE indexing shell out to the sqlite3 CLI, preinstalled on macOS and most Linux distros; Cursor CLI transcripts do not need it.)

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/main/install.sh | sh

or:

go install github.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/cmd/deja@latest   # Go
npx @vshulcz/deja-vu "query"                            # npm, no install
brew install vshulcz/tap/deja-vu                        # Homebrew

Wire it into the agents you use (edits config, keeps a .bak):

deja install --all     # MCP recall for every agent it finds on this machine
deja install --auto    # same, plus session-start auto-recall where supported

That's it. Next session, ask your agent:

have we dealt with jwt refresh rotation before? check your memory

— or with --auto, don't ask: the agent starts each session already knowing what you solved in that project.

CLI

$ deja "jwt refresh token"
[claude] api        · Jul 8 · 8f31c0a9 — 2 matches
  login started failing after refresh token rotation; jwt kid mismatch in tests
  fixed by reloading jwks cache after rotateKey and adding a clock-skew test
[codex]  web        · Jul 1 · b77d91e2 — 1 match
  refresh token cookie needed SameSite=Lax in local callback flow

Command	What it does
deja <query>	Search all histories. Multi-word = AND, substrings match (code finds opencode). --re, --harness, --project, --since 30d, --role, --json.
deja ctx <query>	Compact markdown digest of the best match — pipe it into a prompt.
deja share <id>	Sanitized session digest for a colleague: secrets redacted, tool noise stripped.
deja stats	Totals, per-harness split, top projects, monthly sparkline. --json too.
deja sync export <dir> [--full] / import <dir> / ssh <host> [--pull]	Move memory between machines — via a shared folder or one ssh command. Watermarked, append-only, idempotent.
deja show <id> / deja last [n]	Read one session / list recent ones.
deja resume <id> [--exec]	Reopen a found session in its native harness (claude --resume, codex resume, opencode -s, grok --resume).
deja sources	Discovered stores, sizes, message and redaction counts.
deja mcp	The stdio MCP server (what deja install wires in).
deja warmup	Build/refresh the index without searching — handy in cron or shell startup.
deja index [--rebuild]	Same as warmup; --rebuild forces a full rebuild. Cold builds narrate per-harness progress.
deja update	Download the latest GitHub release, verify its checksum, and replace the current binary.
deja statusline	One line for your status bar: recalls served to agents today. deja install statusline wires it into Claude Code (won't touch an existing statusline).

deja update is for standalone installs. Homebrew and npm installs update through the package manager.

Context piping without MCP:

claude "Prior context: $(deja ctx 'database migration')"

Sync between machines

Point both machines at one shared folder (Syncthing, iCloud, a git repo — anything that moves files):

deja sync export ~/Sync/deja   # machine A: appends new batches since last export
deja sync import ~/Sync/deja   # machine B: picks up what it hasn't seen

Or skip the shared folder when the other machine is a ssh hop away:

deja sync ssh mini          # push new records to mini and import them there
deja sync ssh mini --pull   # fetch mini's new records into this machine

ssh mode uses your system ssh/scp and the deja binary on the remote (looked up on PATH, falling back to ~/.local/bin/deja).

Batches are plain JSONL, redacted on the way out. Import is idempotent, so keep the folder as an append-only log and run both commands from cron if you like. Records never echo back to their origin. --full re-exports everything regardless of watermarks — useful when adding a machine after old batches are gone. Synced sessions show up under imported:<project> in search, recall, and session-start auto-recall.

Teach your agent to remember

deja install --all wires up MCP recall (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, Grok Build — aider has no MCP client, pipe deja ctx instead); deja install --auto does the same and adds session-start auto-recall where the harness supports it (Claude Code hook, Codex hooks.json, an opencode plugin — Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity and Grok Build have no hook that can inject context, so MCP is their full install). To make the agent reach for memory on its own, add this to your CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md:

Before debugging or re-implementing something, run `deja "<query>"` (or the
MCP recall tool) — past agent sessions across Claude Code, Codex, opencode, aider, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Antigravity and Grok Build
are indexed locally. Cite what you reuse.

MCP tools

Tool	Arguments	Returns
recall	query, harness?, limit?	Dense matching snippets, ≤4KB — cheap on context.
recall_context	query	Markdown digest of the best-matching session.

With --auto, a SessionStart hook also feeds the current project's recent memory in automatically — read-only, capped at 2KB, and it never delays or breaks agent startup.

Security

Subagent transcripts are skipped by default (they mostly duplicate the parent session); set DEJA_INCLUDE_SUBAGENTS=1 to index them. Files caught mid-write are handled safely — the torn tail line is picked up on the next pass.

Credentials are redacted at index time: AWS keys, generic api_key=/token= assignments, bearer tokens and raw JWTs, PEM private key blocks, provider tokens (ghp_, sk-, npm_, xox., AIza), and scheme://user:pass@host URLs. The value is replaced with [redacted:<kind>]; surrounding text stays searchable. deja sources shows per-store counts. Opt out with DEJA_NO_REDACT=1 (unsafe). deja share and deja sync export re-apply redaction on the way out.

Supported harnesses

Harness	Store	Status
Claude Code	~/.claude/projects/**/*.jsonl	✅
Codex CLI	~/.codex/sessions/** + history.jsonl	✅
opencode	~/.local/share/opencode/opencode.db	✅
aider	.aider.chat.history.md	✅
Gemini CLI	~/.gemini/tmp/*/chats/**	✅
Cursor	state.vscdb + ~/.cursor/projects/**/agent-transcripts/*.jsonl	✅
Antigravity	~/.gemini/antigravity*/brain/*/.system_generated/logs/transcript.jsonl	✅
Grok Build	~/.grok/sessions/**/updates.jsonl	✅

Custom locations via DEJA_CLAUDE_ROOT, DEJA_CODEX_ROOT, DEJA_OPENCODE_DB, DEJA_AIDER_ROOTS, DEJA_GEMINI_ROOT, DEJA_CURSOR_ROOT, DEJA_CURSOR_CLI_ROOT, DEJA_ANTIGRAVITY_ROOT, DEJA_GROK_ROOT, DEJA_INDEX_DIR. Grok's native GROK_HOME is also honored.

Performance

Measured on a real corpus — 1,250+ sessions, ~3.3GB across three harnesses:

Warm search	7–9 ms typical, ~40 ms worst-case
Cold index (once)	~10 s
Index size	~2.4% of corpus

The index is incremental: when a session file grows, only that file is re-read.

How it works

Local inverted index in ~/.cache/deja: parse JSONL/SQLite stores → redact credentials → records.bin + token buckets → manifest.json tracks per-file state so repeat runs only ingest what changed. The MCP server, stats, share and sync all read the same index. Details: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Privacy: no network path exists in the indexing or search code. Local files in, local cache out.

FAQ

Does anything leave my machine? No. Indexing and search are fully local. sync writes files to a directory you choose, moving them is up to you. The only network call is deja update, which downloads releases from GitHub.

How is this different from cass? cass is the kitchen-sink take on session search: 22 providers, Rust, optional semantic embeddings, a TUI. deja is the opposite bet — one small Go binary, pure lexical, eight harnesses, zero setup — plus the memory-layer pieces around it: auto-recall, redaction, share, sync.

And from MemPalace / Mem0 / Letta? Those are memory platforms: embeddings, vector stores, capture hooks or APIs that record going forward. deja has no capture step at all — it indexes what your agents already wrote to disk, including months of history from before you installed it. They can coexist.

What about secrets already in my logs? They stay in the original harness files (that's your agent's data), but they don't enter deja's index, digests, shares or sync exports.

What about Windows? Builds exist, CI runs the suite on Windows; macOS/Linux are the battle-tested paths. Field reports welcome: #9.

Can I exclude a project? Not yet — planned as --exclude (#8). Today you can point DEJA_*_ROOT at a filtered copy.

How do I wipe everything?

deja uninstall --all
rm -rf ~/.cache/deja

Contributing

make build test lint — see CONTRIBUTING.md. Adding a harness is one parser file: docs/ARCHITECTURE.md. Good first issues are labeled.

License

MIT © Vladislav Shulcz