Hem Vault

Feature: Vault & memory

Overview

The vault is the durable second brain: Obsidian markdown that you and your coding agents share. MCP tools let agents search, load a git-repo project pack, and append facts without inventing “what we usually do.”

Use it when work should survive chat sessions — decisions, gotchas, project context, corrected misconceptions. Do not park secrets, ephemeral debug, or one-off chatter here.

How it works

On install, templates/vault/ is copied into your chosen vault path (idempotent: existing notes are not overwritten). The MCP server resolves the vault via BRAIN_VAULT / config.toml and only reads or writes paths inside that root.

Search is keyword full-text (not embeddings). Project packs are created from projects/_template/ on first get_project_context or project-scoped remember.

Memory policy (injected into harnesses) tells agents to:

  1. Read / search before inventing vault facts
  2. Ask when global vs project scope is unclear
  3. Write only durable knowledge — never secrets

Capabilities

  • Durable Obsidian-ready vault shared by humans and agents
  • Project packs keyed to one git repository each
  • Keyword search with ranked paths, titles, snippets
  • Read a note by relative path
  • Append durable notes globally or into a project pack
  • Load project context in one call
  • Diagnostics via vault_info

How to use

Start of non-trivial work

  1. Resolve the git root folder name as the project slug
  2. Call get_project_context
  3. search_notes for relevant keywords
  4. Answer from vault facts; if nothing found, say so

Capture a decision

Remember that we use Bun for MCP launch in this brain repo.

Agent asks if scope is unclear, then remember with scope=project, project=<slug>, usually projectFile=decisions.

Park unsorted

Park this for later.

→ remember with scope=global, folder=inbox.

Search before inventing

What did we decide about auth?

→ search_notes → read_note on hits → quote the vault; never fabricate.

Health check

Is the vault readable?

→ vault_info → expect readable: true.

Edge cases

  • Prefer a normal home path for the vault; iCloud / sandboxed cloud folders can yield EPERM
  • Project ≠ company or product brand — one folder per git repo
  • _meta/projects-index.md is a manual agent convention today; MCP does not auto-apply it
  • Search requires all query terms to appear; skip .obsidian, .git, node_modules, _template
  • Prefer append / update over duplicate notes
  • Soft prefs and binding process use the guidance system, not remember