
Yggdrasil
io.github.VonderVuflyaPublished by GitHub account VonderVuflyav0.16.0Updated Oct 24, 2026
One shared, durable memory for your AI coding agents — local-first, zero-dependency.
Overview
Local-first shared memory for AI coding agents: lets an assistant save, search and recall durable project decisions and lessons across sessions and tools.
- What you can do
- Save durable memories such as decisions, lessons and project status, with dedupe and secret guarding
- Search and recall memories, either scoped to one project or across all projects
- Bootstrap a project's memory at the start of work and check engine health
- Export a memory as a Markdown note or write a curated digest into agent memory files
- Seed memory from existing agent transcripts, Obsidian vaults and CLAUDE.md repos, and import from other memory tools
- Link two of your own machines or sync through your own git repo
- When to use it
- Useful when you keep re-explaining the same project context, decisions and gotchas to new AI sessions or across Claude Code, Codex and other MCP hosts, and want that memory kept on your own machine rather than in a cloud service.
- Requirements
- Runs as a local process on the desktop, installed from the yggdrasil-memory PyPI package with uvx (or npm, pipx, pip, Homebrew). A one-time guided setup installs an always-on local daemon and registers the MCP tools. The engine generates its own local token; the YGG_ENGINE_TOKEN secret and YGG_ENGINE_URL base URL point the client at the engine. Optional local models need Ollama, LM Studio or llama.cpp.
Installation
In SourceWeft
- Open Yggdrasil in the dashboard and add it to a workspace.
- Enable the server for the chats that should use its tools.
Desktop only via STDIO. STDIO servers start a local process, so they need the SourceWeft desktop host.
Other MCP clients
Follow the launch instructions in the repository.
README
🌳 Yggdrasil
Stop re-explaining your project to every new AI session.
One local memory for Claude Code, Codex, and every MCP agent — shared across sessions, tools, and projects. Zero dependencies. Nothing leaves your machine.
[Latest release] [PyPI] [Glama quality score] [Benchmarks] [AGPL-3.0] [alpha]
Install · How it works · Numbers · Compare · FAQ
Read this in: Русский · 简体中文 · Español · Français · 日本語 · Deutsch
[Yggdrasil — a brand-new session already knows your project, and recalls a fix from another project]
Every new chat, your AI forgets. You re-explain the project, the decisions, the gotchas — every time, in every tool. Yggdrasil is a tiny always-on memory that any agent plugs into. Open a new session, in any project, with any AI, and it already knows what you decided, what broke, and what's still open.
No "let me remind you what we did yesterday." It's just there.
🚀 Install
Two commands, inside Claude Code (the plugin launches via uv):
The engine lazy-starts on first use and generates its own local token — no API key, no cloud, nothing to configure. Codex and Cursor use the same flow.
All other channels — CLI daemon, Homebrew, npm, Claude Desktop, from source…
ygg install is a one-time guided setup: it installs an always-on background service, registers the MCP tools with every agent host it finds — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode — and, if your hardware allows, recommends optional local models (or pick none to stay zero-config).
OpenCode — nothing to configure
Install OpenCode first, then run ygg install (or ygg redeploy if Yggdrasil is already set up) — the entry is written for you and merged into any existing opencode.json. Confirm with:
Installed OpenCode after Yggdrasil? Just re-run ygg install.
If you'd rather write it by hand, note that OpenCode's schema differs from Claude's in four places at once — servers live under mcp (not mcpServers), type is required, command is one array (not command + args), and env is environment (not env), so the Claude snippet won't port:
No token goes in the config — the engine reads the 0600 ~/.yggdrasil/token itself. Run ygg doctor if the tools don't show up.
There is also a yggdrasil-memory skill for any Claude surface: MCP connects the tools, the skill teaches the agent when to use them. Use both for the best behavior.
Try it with nothing installed and a throwaway DB: uvx --from yggdrasil-memory ygg serve --reset --db /tmp/ygg.sqlite.
Then just work: ask your agent "recall what we decided about this project", tell it "remember this decision" — next session it's already there. Verify the install any time with ygg doctor.
Already have history? Seed memory from your existing Claude Code + Codex transcripts, Obsidian vaults, and CLAUDE.md repos — distilled locally:
Leaving another memory tool? ygg import --from mcp-memory --path memory.json pulls its whole store into Yggdrasil (deduped, secret-guarded) — then you can delete it.
Why
- 🧠 Persistent — decisions, lessons, and project status survive across sessions.
- 🔌 One brain, every tool — Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and any MCP host share the same memory.
- 🌐 Cross-project recall — "this looks like what you did in project B — reuse it?"
- 🧹 Curated, not captured — your agent saves the few things that matter; governance dedupes and archives, never deletes.
- 🌱 Self-maintaining (opt-in) — a small local model consolidates memory in the background. Zero API tokens.
- 🪪 One identity everywhere — an optional name and persona every agent picks up, so Claude Code and Codex feel like the same assistant.
- 🔒 100% local — your memory lives on your machine. No cloud, no account, no telemetry.
🧠 How it works
Yggdrasil is memory + tools — the intelligence is your LLM. It just makes sure the right memory is in front of the right agent at the right moment.
- 🛎️ Always-on daemon — a tiny local service (~21 MB RAM) your agents reach over MCP tools (
ygg_search,ygg_recall,ygg_remember…). - 🪝 Hooks — session start auto-injects identity, project status, and open follow-ups (~300 tokens); an optional per-prompt hook auto-recalls memory relevant to each request.
- 📌 Ranking — pinned and frequently-recalled memories surface first.
- 🧹 Governance — duplicates and conflicts are queued for review; changes are non-destructive (archive, never delete).
- 📓 Obsidian — every memory doubles as a plain-Markdown note you can read, edit, and grep.
🎛️ Memory tiers — zero-config by default
Out of the box, Yggdrasil runs on SQLite + FTS5 with zero dependencies — instant keyword search, no models, nothing to download. Optional local models add two independent tiers:
The runtime only computes vectors and runs the background model — every memory and every vector stays in the same local SQLite.
ygg install scans for Ollama, LM Studio and llama.cpp, offers to start whichever is installed but idle, and then shows one menu per job with green for models you already have and red for models it would download. Pick a row, and it writes embed_backend, embed_url and distill_url for you — including the part nobody guesses right, that embed_url wants the /v1 base while distill_url wants the host root. A runtime on another machine is one URL: paste it and the dialect is detected. ygg recommend shows the same scan plus the full catalog without changing anything.
Full model menu
Embeddings (semantic search):
Embedding backend — Ollama by default. ygg install sets all of this for you
once you pick a runtime; the manual route below is for scripted setups and for
changing one thing later. To use an OpenAI-compatible /v1/embeddings server
instead (llama.cpp's llama-server --embeddings, OpenRouter, LM Studio, vLLM),
set embed_backend:
The key is stored in ~/.yggdrasil/embed_api_key (0600) rather than
config.json, and reaches the daemon as a file path — so it never shows up
in ps, the launchd plist or the systemd unit. ygg config list masks it.
Check it took with ygg doctor — dense should name your model:
Wiring LM Studio or OpenRouter by hand? The gotchas (two URL shapes, model ids, JIT loading, inference vs provisioning keys, privacy filters) are in docs/model-backends.md.
Staying local still wins on quality and privacy: on the 232-memory / 110-query
corpus, local paraphrase-multilingual scores recall@1 0.964 vs 0.946
for the free hosted model — and your memories never leave the machine. Reach for
a hosted backend when the box can't run Ollama, not to chase accuracy.
Bigger vectors do not buy accuracy here — on the same corpus
mxbai-embed-large (1024d) scores 0.809 and nomic-embed-text (768d) 0.818,
a difference their confidence intervals swallow whole. What actually moves the
number is whether the model handles your languages: both are English-only and
collapse to 0.40–0.45 on cross-language queries, where the multilingual default
holds 0.95.
Background consolidation (small LLM):
The engine itself is swappable — any service meeting the MemoryBackend contract is a drop-in (YGG_ENGINE_URL); see docs/backend-boundary.md.
🔗 One memory across your machines
Work on a laptop and a beefier box? Link them once and they stop being two brains.
That's it. From then on a memory written on one machine is on the other in about
a second, ygg delete removes it from both, and either machine keeps working
with its own local copy when the other is asleep — reads never wait for the
network. When a machine comes back, the two compare fingerprints and repair
whatever they missed, without you running anything.
There is no polling. Yggdrasil is called a handful of times a day, so writes push as they happen and a sync is triggered by reads; idle machines send nothing.
What this is not: a cloud. There is no relay, no account, no server of ours in
the path. The machines talk to each other directly over your own network, over
TLS with each other's certificate pinned, using a key pair that exists only on
those two machines. The pairing code itself names the issuing machine's
certificate, so even the very first connection is verified — something else on
the network answering in its place gets refused before the code's secret is sent. Nothing binds a network port until you run
ygg link — install Yggdrasil and it stays on loopback, exactly as before.
Details: what travels, what stays, and when to use ygg sync instead
Travels: memories, their relations, and deletions. Stays put: how often you opened a memory and which machine you read it on — that's local ranking, not knowledge. Embedding vectors normally stay local too, with one exception: if both machines run the same embedding model, the vector rides along, so a compute box can do the embedding for the laptop and the laptop never runs a model.
The newer edit wins. Edit a memory on both machines before they talk and the more recent edit is kept on both (a shorter correction included).
Deletions win. If you delete a memory on one machine and edit it on the other
at the same time, the deletion wins and the edit is lost. That's deliberate:
"I deleted the leaked token" has to hold even when two clocks disagree. When you
mean changed my mind, archive it instead — nothing is lost, and
ygg unarchive brings it back on both machines (the later decision wins).
A firewall is caught at pairing. The machine that printed the code calls the
other one back straight away; if it can't get through, ygg link says so and
prints the one command that opens the port to that machine only (ufw, firewalld,
Windows). ygg link --list and ygg doctor keep checking afterwards: a peer
shows ✓ only once writes are confirmed delivered, otherwise the error and how
many changes are waiting. A machine that gets a new address from DHCP is found
again the next time it makes contact.
ygg sync (git) is still there and does a different job: machines that can't
see each other, a work laptop behind a different network, a bare repo on a USB
stick you carry. Use ygg link for machines on one network, ygg sync for
everything else. Both share the same merge rules, so you can run both. If both
machines are on a Tailscale tailnet, ygg link --tailscale works across networks too.
If the pairing code shows the wrong address (it prefers real Ethernet and
Wi-Fi over VM bridges and VPNs, but can still guess wrong), pin it:
ygg config set sync_host 192.168.3.152 — or print the code on the other machine:
the side that pastes it always uses the address the route actually takes.
📊 The numbers
Measured by eval/ygg_eval.py — 232 memories, 110 labelled queries, ranking weights tuned on the dev split only, so holdout is the unbiased number (recall@1, with the paraphrase-multilingual model):
Within a project — the path you use — the right memory is #1 for 0.94 of queries and in the top 3 every time (recall@3 = 1.00). Searching the whole store with no filter is harder (recall@1 0.72, recall@3 0.87 across all 232). Zero-dep lexical mode already solves keyword and code-identifier queries (1.00); the local model adds meaning and cross-language (crosslingual 0.25 → 0.95). The full breakdown in BENCHMARKS.md has 95% CIs, pool sizes, and per-class scores — rerun it in a minute: python3 eval/ygg_eval.py --report.
Corpus size is part of the number. On a real 4,799-memory store the default multilingual embedder falls to the lexical baseline (recall@1 0.55); bge-m3 holds 0.775 there. If your store grows into the thousands, pick bge-m3 — details in BENCHMARKS.md.
🆚 Yggdrasil vs the rest
Everyone else either auto-captures transcripts or sells you a cloud. Yggdrasil's bet: keep the few things that matter, curated and de-duped, in plain rows you own — and share them across every tool and project.
Closest neighbor — claude-mem: capture-everything memory that records and AI-compresses every session (Node 20+ and Bun, a persistent worker daemon; Chroma optional). Yggdrasil is the opposite bet: a small, high-signal store instead of a growing firehose. mem0 is an SDK plus a hosted platform for building apps that remember their users — even self-hosted it needs an LLM API key. Built-in memories are genuinely useful — and structurally siloed: one vendor, one repo, one machine, literal grep. Yggdrasil is the layer above them (and ygg seed can bootstrap itself from those same transcripts). Different layer entirely: context-mode (live context window) and Context7 (fresh library docs) — both pair fine with Yggdrasil.
🧰 Commands
Agents see six MCP tools: ygg_health, ygg_bootstrap, ygg_search, ygg_recall, ygg_remember, ygg_materialize — auto-registered by the plugin or ygg install.
Full ygg CLI reference
Memory ops
Cold start
Service & setup
Give it a personality — edit ~/.yggdrasil/identity.json:
Heavy seeding, weak laptop? Point distillation at any box on your LAN — a desktop with Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp, even an iPhone running a local-LLM server app: ygg config set distill_url http://<box>:11434. Yggdrasil auto-detects the API dialect (Ollama or OpenAI-compatible); your data still never leaves your network — details in docs/ygg-cli.md.
❓ FAQ
Claude Code already has built-in memory — why Yggdrasil?
Built-in memories are per-vendor, per-repo, per-machine, and retrieved by literal text match. Yggdrasil is the layer above: the same memory in Claude Code, Codex, and any MCP host, recall across projects, optional semantic search — still 100% local. It bridges them both ways: ygg seed distills your existing native memory + transcripts into the shared brain, and ygg export-native writes a curated digest back into AGENTS.md/MEMORY.md — so even a fresh clone or a tool without Yggdrasil still gets your curated memory.
Does it send my code or memory to the cloud?
No. The engine, the database, and the optional models all run locally. No account, no telemetry. The only outbound call is a version check against PyPI.
If you link two of your own machines with ygg link, memories travel between those two machines over your own network — directly, over TLS with a pinned certificate, with no relay and no server of ours in the path. Until you run that command nothing listens beyond loopback.
Can a malicious repo plant instructions in my memory?
Recalled memory is injected as clearly-framed reference notes, not instructions, with where each note came from and a marker when it belongs to a different project — so the agent treats it as data and asks before acting on anything in it. Secrets are redacted from transcripts before distillation and refused on write. Still: memory is only as trustworthy as what wrote it — review ygg review now and then.
Does it automatically remember everything?
No — by design. Retrieval is automatic; writing is deliberate (the agent calls ygg_remember for durable lessons). Capture-everything pollutes memory and burns tokens, so we don't. The optional background model consolidates what's already saved (propose-only).
Do I need a GPU or an API key?
No. The default is pure lexical search — zero dependencies, instant. Semantic search is opt-in and uses a local model via Ollama. The installer recommends one that fits your hardware.
How heavy is it, and what does it cost in tokens?
The engine idles at ~21 MB RAM (lexical default) with ~0% CPU; disk is tens of KB per memory. Session start injects ~300 tokens; each tool call returns a small snippet. All heavy work (indexing, embeddings, consolidation) runs off-LLM on your machine.
Can I edit or delete memories by hand?
Yes. Memories materialize to Markdown notes in an Obsidian vault — read, edit, or remove them like any file. Governance and review never delete anything — they archive, which is reversible. Only you hard-delete, explicitly, with ygg delete (and on linked machines that delete reaches both).
🚦 Status & roadmap
Alpha. The happy path and the governance loop are gate-tested (scripts/run_gates.sh); not yet hardened for multi-user or production use. macOS today; Linux/Windows service installers are built and in final on-device testing.
Shipped recently: 🔗 machine-to-machine memory (ygg link) · relation graph (ygg relate: solves / supersedes / contradicts).
Next: 🛰️ cross-surface (one memory across CLI, web, and phone — the HTTP facade is in, see docs/cross-surface.md) · 🐧 Linux/Windows GA.
🤝 Contributing
Issues and PRs welcome. Run scripts/run_gates.sh and python3 -m unittest discover -s tests before submitting — all gates must stay green.
📜 License
GNU AGPL v3.0 — see LICENSE. Free and open source: use, modify, self-host, redistribute. If you modify it or offer it as a network service, you must release your source under the same license.
Source: README.md at commit 3455d1c
Tools
0Version history
2- v0.16.0LatestOct 22, 2026
- v0.15.0Sep 16, 2026
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