Agentic Recall

Long-term memory for agentic tasks. It tells you when it doesn't know.

An MCP server that gives Claude Desktop and Claude Code a persistent memory across sessions — and, unlike a plain vector store, an explicit answer when the corpus does not contain what you asked for.

// ~/.claude.json  (Claude Code)  or  claude_desktop_config.json  (Claude Desktop)
"mcpServers": {
  "memory": {
    "command": "npx",
    "args": ["-y", "agentic-recall@2"],
    "env": { "MEMORY_DIR": "/absolute/path/to/your/memory/folder" }
  }
}

That is the whole install. MEMORY_DIR is the one path you supply, and that is deliberate: the server does not go looking through your disk for your notes.

🟥 Note the @2 — pin the major version. npx -y agentic-recall with no version asks npm for whatever is tagged latest every time its cache is cold, so a new major arrives silently and a config that worked yesterday breaks today. That is not hypothetical: 2.0.0 moved five actions to a second tool, and a tester's in-flight session started failing with received 'index' at action mid-task — because npx had re-resolved latest underneath a running workflow. The cache is what makes an unpinned spec feel stable, and a cache is not a pin: it is cleared by npm cache verify, by disk cleanup, and by every new machine.

@2 takes fixes and features, never a breaking major. agentic-recall@2.0.0 pins exactly.

🟥 Windows users: use this config instead. Bare npx does not work for a Node MCP client on Windows. This is measured, not inferred — CI spawns the published package on windows-latest every push, and reports bare npx -> FAILED: spawn npx ENOENT while cmd /c npx connects:

"memory": {
  "command": "cmd",
  "args": ["/c", "npx", "-y", "agentic-recall@2"],
  "env": { "MEMORY_DIR": "C:/Users/<you>/Documents/memories" }
}

On Windows npx is a batch shim (npx.cmd), and Node's spawn will not resolve it without shell: true. A Node-based MCP client using the config above gets spawn EINVAL and the server silently never connects — it appears configured and does nothing. This is the standard Windows MCP gotcha, not specific to this server (claude-code#58510). npm i -g is not an escape — that installs a .cmd shim too. The only shim-free form is pointing node at the file directly: "command": "node", "args": ["C:/Users/<you>/AppData/Roaming/npm/node_modules/agentic-recall/index.js"].

Whether Claude Desktop itself is affected is still unconfirmed — it may spawn through a shell. The cmd /c form works either way, so it is the one to use on Windows.

🟥 Windows: if npx fails with ECOMPROMISED / Lock compromised, clear the npx cache. Node 24/25 with npm 11 leaves a stale lock in npx's cache directory that it then refuses to refresh (npm/cli#8710). Nothing to do with this server — it hits MCP Inspector and Gemini CLI identically. Measured on a real Windows machine: it reproduced twice, and clearing the cache fixed it (then a 98 s first download):

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\npm-cache\_npx" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
npm cache verify
npx -y agentic-recall@2 --version

If it still fails, two alternatives that avoid npx entirely — both verified end to end: npm install -g agentic-recall (then "command": "agentic-recall", "args": []), or Node 22, where npx works normally.

Requires Node 20 or newer. Nothing else — the embedding model downloads on first index and then runs locally. Your memories never leave the machine.

Prefer to read the code first, or run the suite?