🧠 Persistent Memory Compression Tool for Claude Code

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A Claude Code plugin just dropped that gives Claude real memory across sessions.

Not through prompt engineering tricks, but by automatically capturing what happens during your work and injecting compressed observations when you restart.

Claude-Mem works like a persistent context layer that survives session crashes, context limits, and those annoying moments when you have to restart because you hit token caps.

This open-source tool ❤️ uses lifecycle hooks to watch everything Claude does, extracts the meaningful bits through the Claude Agent SDK, and stores them in a SQLite database with full-text search. What makes it interesting is the progressive disclosure approach: you see an index of past observations with token costs upfront, then pull full details only when needed - mimicking how humans actually retrieve memories instead of dumping everything into context at once.

Highlights:

Automatic Context Injection - No manual commands needed; recent observations auto-inject at session start with type indicators ( critical, informational) and token costs displayed upfront, helping Claude decide whether to fetch details or read source code directly.
Multi-Layer Memory Retrieval - Layer 1 shows observation indexes with token costs, Layer 2 fetches full narratives on-demand via MCP search, Layer 3 accesses original source code and complete transcripts for perfect recall.
10 Search Operations - Search by observations, sessions, prompts, concept tags, files, types, recent context, timeline around specific points, timeline by query match, plus API help—all accessible through the mem-search skill or HTTP endpoints.
Installation - Run /plugin marketplace add thedotmack/claude-mem and /plugin install claude-mem in Claude Code, then restart; Bun and uv auto-install if missing, worker service starts automatically, memory capture begins immediately.

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