memex

Long-term memory for your AI agent — that never leaves your cloud.

Self-hosted on your own AWS. memex indexes your notes and code and lets any MCP agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) search it and cite the source. No SaaS, no telemetry — your second brain stays yours.

You write a lot — notes, decisions, docs, code. Six months later you can't find any of it, and your AI assistant has no idea it exists.

memex is a personal knowledge brain you run in your own cloud. It reads your markdown notes and your code, turns them into a searchable index, and hands that search to your AI agent over the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Now your agent answers "what did I decide about X?" with your own words, cited back to the exact note — instead of guessing.

It's a second brain for you, and long-term memory for your AI.

memex returns the evidence, cited to the exact file. Your agent writes the answer. (The brain retrieves — it doesn't chat.)

• Your knowledge is private. Most "AI memory" tools upload everything to someone else's servers. memex runs entirely inside one AWS account you control — your notes never leave your cloud, and there's zero telemetry.
• One brain, every agent. It exposes a single MCP endpoint. Any MCP-compatible tool connects to it; you don't re-index your life per app.
• Search that actually finds things. It blends meaning (vector embeddings), exact words (keyword search), and relationships (an entity graph) — so the thing you only half-remember still surfaces.
• Small and boring on purpose. No orchestrator, no multi-tenancy, no SaaS to depend on. It fits on one small EC2 box, and you can read the whole thing in an afternoon.

Who it's for: developers who live in Claude Code / Cursor / Codex, note-takers with a markdown vault, and anyone who refuses to put their second brain on someone else's servers.

memex indexes your content once, then answers searches on demand. When your agent asks a question, here's the round trip — note that memex hands back evidence, and the agent composes the answer:

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    actor You
    participant Agent as Your AI agent
    participant memex as memex (MCP)
    participant DB as Postgres + pgvector
    You->>Agent: "What did I decide about X?"
    Agent->>memex: tools/call search { q }
    memex->>DB: vector + keyword + graph query
    DB-->>memex: top chunks, ranked (RRF)
    memex-->>Agent: cited chunks (evidence, not an answer)
    Agent-->>You: answer, grounded in your own notes

Under the hood: a small Bun + TypeScript service, Postgres 16 with pgvector, AWS Bedrock for embeddings, and a Cloudflare Tunnel for HTTPS — so no EC2 port is ever exposed. The entire public surface is two routes: GET /health and POST /mcp. That's the whole attack surface.

Full topology, every container, and the security model: ARCHITECTURE.md.

You'll need an AWS account, Terraform 1.6+, docker compose v2, and a domain you control (for the Cloudflare Tunnel).

git clone https://github.com/<your-org>/memex.git
cd memex

make init     # interactive bootstrap: AWS account, domain, buckets -> .env + tfvars
make audit    # PII / secrets gate (must pass on a clean clone)
make plan     # preview the AWS resources
make apply    # create them

make apply boots one EC2 host, pulls the repo, fetches secrets from AWS Secrets Manager, and starts the two containers (memex + cloudflared). Your brain is then live at https://brain.<your-domain>/mcp.

Connecting Claude Code (or any MCP client): deploy/memex/docs/CLAUDE-CODE.md.

Learn more: ARCHITECTURE.md · API / MCP tools · Operations · Privacy · Changelog

If a private, self-hosted brain for your AI agent is something you want to exist, give it a ⭐ — it's the signal that keeps this maintained. Bugs and ideas welcome in issues.

memex is intentionally single-user and small — open an issue before anything that adds infrastructure or changes the deploy story. Please read CLAUDE.md (the repo's working rules) first.

Found a vulnerability? Please don't open a public issue — see SECURITY.md for the private disclosure channel.

MIT. Fork it, redeploy it, modify it, ship it. Solo-maintained, no SLA — if you need guarantees, fork and pin.