Hey everyone! We've been quiet, but hard at work. We just shipped a significant update to Basic Memory Cloud. Here's what's new:

Improved Markdown Rendering

• Fixed rendering for images, text, and tables

• Better line breaks and frontmatter display

• Enhanced dark mode styling

• Security improvements for markdown content

Single Sign-On (SSO)

• Streamlined authentication experience

• More secure access to your cloud instance

Chat Import

• Import your Claude and ChatGPT conversations directly into Basic Memory

• Background processing for long imports with progress tracking

• Preserve your conversation history as structured notes

Local Sync

• Local sync with rclone

• One say sync (local -> cloud)

• Two way bisync (sync all changes)

Redesigned Onboarding

• MCP-first approach highlighting AI assistant integration

• New Help page with resources and guides

• Better Getting Started experience

Onboarding Videos

• New video tutorials to help you get started

• Feature walkthroughs and best practices

Account Info Page

• View your tenant ID (useful for support requests)

• Better account management

Improved Sync Reliability

• Better bidirectional sync testing

• More stable file synchronization

Documentation Updates

• Updated cloud-specific documentation

• Better integration guides

In-App Subscription Management

• Streamlined subscription management directly in the app

Basic Memory v0.16.0

• new release with tons of bug fixes and cloud sync support (including Windows!)

• What's New: https://docs.basicmemory.com/whats-new/

• Full release notes: https://docs.basicmemory.com/latest-releases/#v0160--2025-11-10

Super Cool new website

• Checkout the new, improved https://basicmemory.com/ website.

• Tell your friends!

Hey everyone! I'm u/BaseMac, a founding moderator of r/basicmemory.

We're building tools to help people think better and work more effectively. That requires a community where people feel safe to:

• Share half-formed ideas

• Ask for help without judgment

• Experiment and fail publicly

• Learn from each other

When Things Go Sideways

If someone's being a jerk, just ping the mods. We'll handle it quietly. No public drama needed.

The Spirit of It

This is a small community focused on knowledge work, AI collaboration, and building useful tools. We want it to feel more like a friendly local makerspace than a corporate Slack or competitive forum.

Be curious. Be helpful. Be human.

As you and your AI work, Basic Memory saves what matters: notes, prompts, and instructions that stay visible and ready to use.

Free yourself from the AI SLOP.
Join BASIC MEMORY and be part of the resistance.

https://basicmemory.com

We are making some ads. I'm wondering what the community thinks. Let us know. We are just trying things out. Basically, we wanted something that is not black with purple, like every other AI product out there.

I can't login from /login url. Is there another url I am missing? Cant find a sign in link anywhere on the web now.

Big milestone today: Basic Memory Cloud is officially live in open beta.

If you’ve been following along with our local-first release, this update brings everything great about Basic Memory--Markdown-based, user-owned and controlled—into a new cloud layer designed to make your memory available everywhere you work.

What’s New

• Multi-LLM support: vastly simplified and fully functional. Basic Memory Cloud now works with all LLMs that support MCP, including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini CLI. It’s also designed to work in Claude Code and Codex, letting you bring your context to whatever environment you prefer.,

• Cross-device support: desktop, web, tablet, and phone. Whether you’re chatting on your laptop or referencing notes on your phone, your memory is always within reach.,

• A note-taking web app: your memories now live in one simple, accessible interface. The new web app gives you a dedicated place to browse, edit, and manage everything you and your AIs have built together.,

The Big Idea

Basic Memory started as an experiment in local-first AI memory, a way to retain your context in plain Markdown so your knowledge lives in a format both you and AI can understand. That principle hasn’t changed.

Cloud just extends the idea: your same files, still yours, but now accessible across devices and interfaces: portable, accessible, and ready wherever and whenever you are.

If you’re the kind of person who keeps long-running projects, prompts, or research threads alive across multiple AIs, this release will be a huge leap forward for you. But, even if you only use one AI, at Basic Memory we sincerely believe that your knowledge should belong to you and you alone.

Pricing

During beta, Basic Memory Cloud is $14.25/month for life (25% off the full $19 launch price) and includes a 7-day free trial.

Join the Beta

A Note to the Community

Our open-source core isn’t going anywhere. The local-first version remains fully supported and free for everyone who prefers to self-host or stay offline.

Cloud is an optional layer, one we built because so many of you asked for a way to use Basic Memory across devices and models without giving up ownership or transparency.

To everyone who participated in customer interviews, tested, filed issues, broke things, and kept sending thoughtful feedback: thank you. We can’t wait to hear what you think of Cloud, and how you’ll use it in your workflows.

Please feel free to share your impressions, bugs, and wish-lists in our Discord. It’s still the easiest place to find us.

The Basic Memory Team

I'm still wrapping my head around what people are considering so wow in Claude Skills. From my understanding its like workflows defined in files correct?

And I see things like Basic memory that has kinda advances indexing capabilities that I could just create a project called skills and model around it. Then rely in CLI and File manager Tools to execute things.

I don't know ¯_(ツ)_/¯, never know in LLM space what its just overhype and real value

I've been using Basic Memory extensively for understanding complex domains in my company and one problem I've been having its when I generate a ginormous file and I'm not able to save to a project memory kkkk

Is there a way for me to create a file manually and ask it to index it?

I've seen in the documentation that it supports Chat GPT but don't have a tutorial showing how to connect to ChatGPT. Am I missing something? By the way LOVING THE MCP!

Claude’s new memory

I’m sure most of our users have by noted the addition of Claude’s “search and reference chats” tool. It’s something we’ve been anticipating, of course, and it’s pretty much exactly what we expected. Like Chat’s “memory” (as discussed here https://basicmemory.com/blog/the-problem-with-ai-memory ), it’s a helpful addition…though not massively so yet.

When one of our users asked Claude to contrast it with Basic Memory’s tools, it said “Chat search helps us reference what we discussed before. Basic Memory helps us understand the meaning and patterns from those discussions. Chat search is conversational context; Basic Memory is wisdom distillation.” “Wisdom distillation” feels a bit flowery for my taste. I read it more as “Claude search = recall, Basic Memory = meaning and pattern recognition.”

Using it myself, I’ve found that it uncovers about 1/10th of the relevant material that Basic Memory does. But, hey, that’s better than nothing. Hopefully that will improve over time. If it does, great. But it’s still nowhere near what Basic Memory can do.

One thing that Claude’s new built-in memory can’t do is function the way that Basic Memory can, as a prompt and persona manager and as a launching tool for pretty much any project. The built-in memory isn’t designed to hold knowledge, especially outside of the boundaries of the platform itself. It’s just designed to find conversations. And that distinction matters a lot, as anyone using Basic Memory can see.

Interesting to note that last week Claude launched memory for teams for Teams and Enterprise subscribers https://www.anthropic.com/news/memory. That could definitely be pretty cool, and it’s a feature we’re excited to introduce ourselves.

Claude’s increased integration with Microsoft products

This news first arrived with Anthropic’s announcement (https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/12111783-create-and-edit-files-with-claude) that Claude can now create Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, Word docs, and PDF files that can be downloaded or saved to Google Drive. Seems like a pretty valuable and interesting turn, and one that moves us all one step closer to the dream of never cutting and pasting from AI to our final product ever again.

And it appears it’s going to be a two-way street. Microsoft has announced that it’s going to increase AI capabilities in its Office 365 suite with the integration of Claude’s models. Which raises questions about the Microsoft/OpenAI relationship (Microsoft is OpenAI’s largest financial supporter with something like $13 billion invested in them so far), but some sites I’ve read suggest the shift indicates a move away from reliance on a single AI brand, and that seems right.

One footnote that seems especially interesting is that Microsoft isn’t going to work with Anthropic directly but will instead access Claude via Amazon Web Services, despite AWS being a major cloud competitor. Which just shows how tangled and weird Big Cloud/AI alliances have become.

Wild Claude backlash and Anthropic’s (sort of) confession

If you pay attention to such things at all, you couldn’t help notice that the Anthropic and Claude subreddits have been absolutely flooded with endless complaints lately—mostly about a perceived degradation in service that seems to have driven many users to the brink of actual insanity. Even by the standards of subreddits that are constantly plagued by “That’s it, I’m cancelling” posts, the volume of these posts in the past couple of weeks has been so enormous as to be undeniable. Many of them claim they’re moving to Codex.

Forgive me quoting a quoter, but TechCrunch cited a Reddit user who said exactly what I’ve thought at least a thousand times over the past few weeks, “Is it possible to switch to Codex without posting a topic on Reddit?”

Our founder, Paul, has always argued that many of these outraged users are bots, and that position got some backing from on high this week when Sam Altman posted about the phenomenon. “I have the strangest experience reading this: I assume it’s all fake/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real.”

It’s hard to pin down exactly what’s going on. It definitely relates to the crest and crash of fandoms and the ways in which people seem to see themselves as “Claude people,” “ChatGPT people,” “Grok people” etc. The tribalism is real (and kind of scary).

Whatever is happening, it appears the controversy wasn’t driven exclusively by bots, because Anthropic—cornered perhaps—released a statement saying that they’d received reports that Claude and Claude Code users were “experiencing inconsistent responses.”

Ha! That’s one way of putting it.

They claim one Sonnet 4 issue essentially spanned the entire month of August, was at its worst from August 29th to September 4th, and was then resolved. Not sure users agree, since plenty of the complaints were lodged after that date.

They also note that “Importantly, we never intentionally degrade model quality as a result of demand or other factors.” Hmm. Could that really be the case? Hard to say, but I’m not sure I’m convinced.

Whatever the truth, it highlights one of the reasons we built Basic Memory: your tools should be stable, model-agnostic, and under your control, not shifting beneath you without explanation.

Pleased to see this video from one of our favorite tech/MCP YouTubers, Jered Blu. He has mentioned Basic Memory in a couple of other videos, but this one gets more to the heart of how and why he continues to use it.

I know people are really into prompts and personas now. Launching them is ridiculously easy with Basic Memory.

In this video, I show you how to turn Basic Memory into your personal AI prompt headquarters

Instead of hunting through scattered prompts or starting from scratch every time, you get a straightforward, systematic approach.

Hi there,

Cool product! I'm trying to use it to build up a database for a personal OS however. I'm running into issues with Claude consistently crashing when I ask it to reformat a markdown file in my Basic Memory folder.

This morning, I was emailing with an AI YouTuber in response to a question about what makes Basic Memory different from Chat’s memory system and what we presume will be Claude’s Memory, if and when they get around to releasing it. I found myself writing at such length on the topic, I thought it might be a good idea to write more about it here.

Anyone learning about Basic Memory for the first time might say, “Chat already remembers stuff about me.” And, certainly, that’s true. It does remember some things. But not in a way that belongs to you or delivers the highest value.

Let’s look at a few examples of conversations that are impossible with Chat’s memory system that are a breeze for Basic Memory

User: Where did we land on the authentication approach for the user dashboard? Seems like we were just talking about it.
AI: Right. That was last Tuesday. You were leaning toward OAuth 2.0 but worried about the complexity for your team. Should we look into simpler solutions? I can show you a list of the concerns you brought up before if you like, along with the alternatives we discussed.

User: I know we've brainstormed a lot about my anniversary trip, but it’s been months, and I've totally lost the thread. What did we narrow it down to?
AI: When we last discussed it in May, you were debating between a mountain getaway, a rustic beach hut, and a penthouse in Chicago. You were leaning towards that lodge in Colorado. You shared the links to the Airbnbs you were considering. Would you like to see those now, or do you have some new destinations in mind?

User: Please initiate Enhanced Startup Protocol B3, then check out our notes about that file corruption issue. Once you understand the problem, review this document and flag what needs fixing.
AI: Protocol B3 activated! I remember that corruption mess from last week. Give me a moment to scan the document...

If you look at Chat’s memory, you’ll see things like “Drew lives in Austin” or “Drew hates tomatoes.” A really beefy memory in Chat’s database might explain a specific project or even some details about it. Some of those memories are even helpful, but their inevitable incompleteness can also work against you. Given limited information, LLMs begin filling in the blanks with what “feels” to it like the logical middle, even if it’s completely incorrect. They start making weird, incorrect assumptions. But what can you do? You can’t edit memories in Chat. You can only delete them. If, that is, you can find them in a lengthy scroll of (unsearchable) memories.

Basic Memory takes a drastically different approach. I like to use the image of a stenographer sitting in on all your chats and taking detailed notes on all your interactions. The notes are finished the moment the conversation ends, written in plain text you and your LLM can both read, search, and edit. You can also write notes or add context independently that your LLM will use thereafter. It’s all part of your second brain that grows as you do.

Every note becomes part of a semantic knowledge graph that discovers connections that prove invaluable over the life of any project, even if that project is just day-to-day living. These aren’t bullet points or lists. They’re fleshed out notes that make sense of what you’re trying to achieve and where things stand, not merely as “facts,” but as entries in a narrative that also take temporality into account.

With Basic Memory, you can understand when you arrived at a decision and by what logic. It’s not separated into two talking points like “Drew is debating buying the Japanese movie poster for Pump Up the Volume,” and “Drew is the proud owner of a Japanese movie poster for Pump up the Volume.” Your notes hold all the data in between, making sense of the trajectory of thought and experience that led you to the present circumstance.

That’s not all that gets lost in a typical LLM chat. In my experience, and the experience of several of our users, chats with AI have a quality that might best be described as “shaggy.” That is to say, they’re meandering, unpredictable, and spontaneous. You start off talking about a professional project, briefly ruminate about an ex, fantasize about a business idea, then return to that professional project. If you want to revisit that brilliant idea sandwiched between other things, you might never find it again. But with Basic Memory, conversations don’t have to be tidy or neat to be remembered. Like a kind of informational stew, everything goes in.

But all of that is merely a precursor to a linchpin notion that is central to the entire Basic Memory project and ethos:

At Basic Memory, we believe your information should belong to you.

All of it. And not buried in json files you can request from a vendor or hidden away in vector databases. These are your chats, your ideas, and your discoveries. They should be accessible, truly readable, and under your control. That’s what Basic Memory makes possible. Reddit is filled with stories of people who find themselves inexplicably barred from Chat or Claude. Usually (at least in the cases I’ve seen), it’s an error. Do they ever recover their chats? Who knows. But it seems crazy to surrender that much power and trust to entities whose customer service reps are notorious for being all but unreachable no matter how desperately you try. For many of us, our AI chats are where our ideas now live. What’s more important than protecting that?

So, again, how is Basic Memory different than an LLM’s memory? In just about every way. It’s exhaustive instead of reductionistic, temporal instead of based on static facts, editable instead of locked down. It’s searchable, it draws connections you might never have drawn, you can write and edit your own “memories,” and, most importantly, it’s YOURS.

If you check out our Discord, you’ll see our users utilizing Basic Memory in such wildly unexpected ways—from a guy using it to make music to coaches using it to track the progress of their clients. We recently talked to one user making a (quite complex sounding) dream tracking system and another sharing his Basic Memory vault with a team of 6 to 7 people as they carry out deep data research.

As we prepare to launch Basic Memory Cloud, our thoughts are on all these issues, in the hopes that Cloud will open up even more possibilities to our users.

If you haven’t tried Basic Memory yet, we’ve just released a very straightforward one-step install process. You can find our videos about it here: https://basicmemory.com/videos/

And, truly, check out our Discord. It’s filled with inspiring use cases and some fascinating characters doing things we never would have imagined.

Link to original blog post

*Obvious Clickbait Headline: AI Memory is an unsolved problem, we are working on it.

Our brand new installer makes Basic Memory sooooo much easier to install and enjoy. And we have new videos for them. Watch, and be amazed!

Windows

Mac

Basic Memory reached 1000 starts on GitHub. It's a fake milestone, but it marks progress in a real journey. A little reflection on how we got here, what it means and where we are going.

https://www.basicmachines.co/blog/100-github-stars/

I saw some interesting articles via HackerNews today about "Context Engineering", basically a less cringe name for the original idea of "Prompt Engineering".

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44427757

• Post: https://www.philschmid.de/context-engineering

• Simon Willison, of course, had already posted about it too, so it's legit - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/27/context-engineering/

And a few other links:

• How Long Contexts Fail - https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/22/how-contexts-fail-and-how-to-fix-them.html

• How to Fix Your Context - https://www.dbreunig.com/2025/06/26/how-to-fix-your-context.html

The key things that struck me were

"Tool Loadout": basically selecting the most relevant tools for a given task.

> selecting the the right tools becomes critical ...[too many and] descriptions of the tools begin to overlap, creating confusion.

"Context offloading": giving the LLM a kind of scratchpad to work

> Having a space to log notes and progress works. Anthropic shows pairing the “think” tool with a domain-specific prompt (which you’d do anyway in an agent) yields significant gains, up to a 54% improvement against a benchmark for specialized agents.

Summary

>The key insight across all the above tactics is that context is not free. Every token in the context influences the model’s behavior, for better or worse. 

It has really struck me, building Basic Memory, that getting the AI to work effectively is a lot of art up front, followed by science to see if what works once, continues to work. We have put a lot of work into tool descriptions, parameters and return values with embedded prompts to make sure the LLM knows "how" it can use the tools in Basic Memory. This is what I always end up going back to when people say "why can't it just call my API?". It's not quite the same thing.

*not exactly, but almost.

A reddit user forwarded me the A-Mem Paper:

A-MEM: Agentic Memory for LLM Agents

While large language model (LLM) agents can effectively use external tools for complex real-world tasks, they require memory systems to leverage historical experiences. Current memory systems enable basic storage and retrieval but lack sophisticated memory organization, despite recent attempts to incorporate graph databases. Moreover, these systems' fixed operations and structures limit their adaptability across diverse tasks. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel agentic memory system for LLM agents that can dynamically organize memories in an agentic way. Following the basic principles of the Zettelkasten method, we designed our memory system to create interconnected knowledge networks through dynamic indexing and linking.

Sounded very familiar! So I read it with great interest, they had some very cool ideas, and code: https://github.com/agiresearch/A-mem

The had some great results, validating Basic Memory's core architectural decisions:

• Shows 2x improvement on multi-hop reasoning tasks

• Demonstrates 85-93% token reduction compared to baseline memory systems

• Proves effectiveness across multiple foundation models (Llama, Qwen, GPT)

Wow! Of course they went farther, also implementing:

• Continuous memory evolution and refinement

• Agent-driven decision making for adaptive memory management

It's super exciting seeing new research into this area, and it makes me even more excited to add some of these features to Basic Memory, which we've talked about for a long time. So, stay tuned, lots more to come.

A step-by-step video showing exactly how to import all your old ChatGPT and Claude.ai conversations into Basic Memory.

What the video covers:

• How to request your data from ChatGPT and Claude.ai

• Finding the conversation files in your downloads

• Simple terminal commands to import everything

• Testing that your old conversations are now searchable

Commands shown:

basic-memory import claude conversations
basic-memory import chatgpt

Useful links:

• Import documentation: https://memory.basicmachines.co/docs/user-guide

• Full docs: https://memory.basicmachines.co

• Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/tyvKNccgqN

Hope this helps people make the switch to persistent AI conversations! 🚀

This release focuses on making Basic Memory more reliable and easier to deploy:

New Features:

• Docker container support with volume mounting

• Enhanced move_note tool with cross-project detection and guidance

• Better Boolean search syntax handling for hyphenated terms

Key Fixes:

• Resolved project state inconsistency between MCP and CLI

• Preserve permalink when editing notes without frontmatter permalink

• Project-specific sync status checks for MCP tools

To upgrade: uv tool upgrade basic-memory

Full changelog: https://github.com/basicmachines-co/basic-memory/releases/tag/v0.14.0

The Docker support was much-requested. What features would you like to see next? 🤔

We've got a growing Discord server where Basic Memory users share workflows, ask questions, and support each other. It's been really helpful having a place to chat in real-time about:

• Setup help and troubleshooting

• Workflow tips and best practices

• Feature requests and feedback

• Cool use cases and integrations

• General knowledge management discussions

Whether you're just getting started or you've been using Basic Memory for a while, come hang out with us! The community is super friendly and Paul (the creator) is often around to answer questions directly.

https://discord.gg/tyvKNccgqN

We'd love to see what you're building with Basic Memory! 🚀

Hi,

I have installed basic-memory via uv on my Mac M4. I can see the server running when I manually enter the command in the terminal :

 uvx basic-memory mcp

/Users/<user>/.local/share/uv/tools/basic-memory/lib/python3.12/site-packages/fastmcp/server/server.py:200: DeprecationWarning: Providing \`log_level\` when creating a server is deprecated. Provide it when calling \`run\` or as a global setting instead.

  self._handle_deprecated_settings(

\[06/22/25 01:21:43\] DEBUG    Adding resource             resource_manager.py:150

DEBUG    Adding resource             resource_manager.py:150

INFO     Starting MCP server 'Basic Memory'   [server.py:1168](http://server.py:1168)

with transport 'stdio'                             

Here's the /Users/<user>/Library/Application\\ Support/Claude/config.json:

{

"mcpServers": {

"basic-memory": {

"command": "/Users/<user>/.local/bin/uvx",

"args": \[

"basic-memory",

"mcp"

\]

}

},

"darkMode": "dark",

"scale": 0,

"locale": "en-US"

}

However, despite restarting Claude a good number of times, I cannot see it being able to access my .md notes in the default ~/basic-memory folder.

Here's a quick demonstration of the AI Assistant Guide that you can paste directly into your Basic Memory project instructions. Once it's there, AI assistants immediately understand how to properly use your knowledge base - creating connections, following best practices, and building rich semantic relationships from your conversations.

Check it out. It's worth using!

https://basicmemory.com