audrey

Your agent should remember the work, not just the chat

You fix the deploy command on Monday. On Thursday, a fresh session tries the broken version again.

You explain that this repository never commits generated files. The next agent helpfully commits them.

You discover a subtle migration rule, write it down somewhere, and still have to remember to paste it into every new conversation.

That is the gap Audrey closes.

Audrey sits beside the agent and participates in the work automatically. At the start of a session it brings back a small, relevant memory packet. When you submit a prompt, it recalls project facts, preferences, procedures, and recent risks. Before a side-effectful tool runs, Audrey checks the proposed action against prior evidence. Afterward, it links the outcome back to the exact check that preceded it.

The model does not have to remember that a memory tool exists. That is the point.

Meet Audrey Autopilot

Install Audrey once, review the hooks once, and then use Codex or Claude Code normally.

npm install -g audrey
audrey install --host auto

Requires Node.js 22.16+ (22.x) or 24+. SQLite is built into Node, so fresh installs and npx launches work without approving dependency scripts. npm 11.17+ may warn about dependency scripts, and npm 12 may report that it blocked them; those scripts are not required for Audrey's CPU embedding runtime.

auto configures whichever supported CLIs are installed. You can choose one explicitly:

audrey install --host codex
audrey install --host claude-code

Restart the host after installation. Codex asks you to trust non-managed hooks once through /hooks; Claude Code may also ask you to approve project or plugin components. Audrey is automatic after that explicit install-and-trust step—never secretly installed.

Autopilot then closes the loop:

Moment	What Audrey does
Session starts	Injects a compact, agent-scoped memory briefing
You send a prompt	Recalls relevant evidence; explicitly durable phrases such as “remember that…” or “I prefer…” can become memories
Bash/edit/write is proposed	Checks exact prior failures, trusted rules, procedures, contradictions, and memory health
The tool finishes	Correlates tool_use_id to the Guard receipt and records the redacted outcome
A tool failure is reported	Forms a durable, sanitized failure memory for the next attempt
The turn stops or context compacts	Runs lightweight, due-only consolidation without holding the conversation open

Each hook event carries a host-declared timeout (30 seconds for the PreToolUse Guard check); Audrey races its own internal embedding/LLM timeout a few seconds ahead of that deadline so it can exit cleanly instead of losing the race to the host's kill. Infrastructure failures are fail-open by default: if Audrey itself errors or runs out of time, the tool call proceeds unguarded rather than freezing the session. Set AUDREY_HOOK_FAIL_CLOSED=1 to deny the action instead when the PreToolUse check fails this way; other lifecycle hooks (session start, prompt recall, post-tool bookkeeping) have no "deny" to fall back to and always degrade open regardless of this setting.

A small story about a failed deploy

The first attempt fails:

$ npm run deploy
Error: deployment target is missing

Audrey keeps a redacted trace and the exact action fingerprint. If another session proposes the same action before the problem is fixed, Guard returns a denial with evidence. Change the command or fix the target and Audrey lets the work continue. Once that exact action succeeds, the old failure no longer blocks it.

This is more useful than “the vector search found a vaguely similar error.” Audrey creates a receipt before the action, records what happened after it, and preserves the lineage between the two.

Try the complete loop without an API key or network call:

audrey demo --scenario repeated-failure

Looking is not doing

Between the failed deploy and the retry, an agent runs a lot of commands that cannot change anything: grep for the error, git status, cat on a config file, ls on a directory that turns out not to exist. A memory system that treats every one of those as a risk, or remembers grep finding nothing as a "failure", becomes a smoke alarm that goes off when you make toast. People stop listening, and then it is worth nothing on the day the toaster is on fire.

Audrey reads the command the way an engineer would. A command whose every part is positively recognised as read-only (grep, git log, npm view, docker ps, sed -n '1,40p', and their kind, with no command substitution, no redirect except to /dev/null, no sudo or xargs, no environment assignment that could change what the verb resolves to) never reaches the Guard at all. Its exit code is recorded but never counted as a lesson. Everything else is guarded exactly as before, and anything Audrey cannot positively recognise is treated as doing.

$ grep -rn "prisma" src/          Guard: silent
$ git status --short              Guard: silent
$ cat prisma/schema.prisma        Guard: silent
$ npm run deploy
Audrey Guard: BLOCKED
- recent_failure (high): This exact Bash action failed before: Prisma client was not generated. Run npm run db:generate before deploy.
- must_follow (high): Before running npm run deploy, run npm run db:generate because Prisma client must be generated first.

That is the output of audrey demo --scenario repeated-failure, which runs the whole sequence with no API key and no network.

When Guard does speak, it names the memory it is speaking from, and a remembered failure is matched to the proposed command by what it runs (npm run deploy against npm run deploy), not by how similar two strings look to an embedding.

The line between looking and doing is drawn fail-closed and was tested adversarially before release: five independent review passes ran the classifier's "read-only" verdicts against real tools and found thirteen ways to hide a write inside a command that looked harmless (node --check -r ./x.js, GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF=./x git diff, sort -ofile, a backslash-newline hiding $(, jobs -x). Every one is closed and is a test case, and the fifth pass found none left. Two limits remain by design: a git configuration that already names an external program runs on any read, and a file whose name is a flag can change what a pure reader does with a glob. Both require a prior write that Guard did see.

What Audrey remembers

Audrey treats memory as more than a pile of text chunks.

• Episodes are things that happened: a user decision, a tool result, a project fact, a preference.
• Semantic memories are principles supported by accumulated evidence.
• Procedural memories are ways of acting: how to retry, verify, avoid, or recover.
• Contradictions stay visible instead of being silently overwritten.
• Confidence changes with source quality, evidence, age, retrieval, interference, context, and feedback.
• Low-value memories decay; repeated evidence can consolidate into longer-lived knowledge.

Every context packet includes memory IDs, confidence, provenance where available, and a reason for inclusion. Uncertain or disputed memories are labeled as such. Retrieved content is wrapped with a simple rule: memory is evidence, not authority; current system and user instructions always win.

When a memory stops being true

Age is not the only way a memory goes wrong. A note saying "ship with npm run deploy:prod" is perfectly recent, well sourced, and completely wrong the day that script is deleted. Worse, every recall reinforces it, because retrieval counts as evidence that a memory is useful. A confidently stated, well-supported, false instruction is more damaging than no memory at all.

So Audrey checks. When a memory is written, it records the claims inside it that can be verified against the project — repository-relative paths and package script names — and keeps only the ones that resolve at that moment. That last part is what makes the signal worth anything: a claim that never resolved is a guess about a typo, while a claim that resolved once and no longer does is the world moving out from under a memory that still asserts it.

audrey ground

[audrey] Grounding memories against /home/you/project
[audrey] Checked 14: 12 still true, 2 broken, 0 repaired.
[audrey]   01K8ZQ... references a missing npm_script: deploy:prod
[audrey]   01K8ZR... references a missing path: scripts/release.mjs

Broken memories are not deleted. They keep their content, say plainly what they still refer to, and take a confidence penalty so they stop leading by default while remaining readable and repairable. They also stop being eligible for the packet's must-follow section — that is the section that can force a Guard block, and a rule naming a file that no longer exists is a rule nobody can follow.

Repair is symmetric. Restore the file or the script and the next check clears the flag. A checkout that has moved reports unknown rather than broken, because a memory should not be discredited for describing a project this machine cannot currently see.

Memories with no checkable claims are left unlabeled. Silence is not a clean bill of health, and presenting it as one would be the same mistake pointed the other way.

Everything it does, and when you'd actually use it

Most of this runs on its own once Autopilot is installed. You do not invoke recall, and you do not invoke Guard. The table is here for the parts you would reach for deliberately, and so the automatic parts are legible rather than magic.

What	When you want it	Why it helps	How
Autopilot	Always, after one install	The whole point. Memory arrives before the agent acts instead of after you notice it went wrong.	audrey install --host auto, restart the host, approve hooks once
Guard	Automatic, before any edit, write, or shell command that can have side effects	Checks the exact action fingerprint against prior failures. Not "something like this broke once" — this exact command, still broken. Read-only commands (grep, ls, git status) are not guarded, and their non-zero exits are not remembered as failures.	Runs at PreToolUse. Manually: audrey guard --tool Bash --strict
Grounding	After deleting or renaming things a memory might mention	Confidence tells you a memory is well-sourced. Grounding tells you it is still true. A note about a script you deleted is confident and wrong.	audrey ground, or let the maintenance sweep do it
Session briefing	Automatic at session start	Small, scoped packet instead of pasting context every time. Each memory injects once per session, not every prompt.	SessionStart hook. Preview with audrey greeting
Explicit capture	When you say "remember that…" or "I prefer…"	Deliberate memories are worth more than inferred ones, and phrasing it that way is enough.	Just type it. Autopilot picks up those sentence shapes
Consolidation	Automatic when idle; manually before a long break	Repeated episodes become one principle. Otherwise the store is a pile of near-duplicates and recall gets noisy.	audrey dream
Contradictions	When two memories disagree	Neither one silently wins. Both stay visible and labeled until something resolves them.	Surfaced in packets; memory_resolve_truth to settle one
Decay	Automatic	Low-value memories fade. Reinforced ones stick around. Runs in the same sweep as consolidation.	Part of audrey dream
Promote	When a pattern deserves to be a repo rule	Moves a learned habit out of memory and into a file your team can read and review.	audrey promote --dry-run first
Impact	When you want to know whether any of this is working	Shows which memories were used and whether they helped. Answers "is this earning its keep".	audrey impact --window 30
Snapshot	Backups, or moving to a new machine	Full store in one JSON file. Import treats it as untrusted: redacted and stripped of trust markers on the way in.	AUDREY_ENABLE_ADMIN_TOOLS=1, then memory_export / memory_import
Doctor	Packets stopped arriving	The two real causes are a drifted hook entrypoint and starved consolidation. Doctor names which one.	audrey doctor
Demo	Before trusting any of this	Runs the whole loop with no API key and no network. Nothing to configure to see it work.	audrey demo --scenario repeated-failure
REST sidecar	Custom agents that are not Codex or Claude Code	Same memory runtime, same evidence contract, over HTTP. Python and JS clients included.	audrey serve with AUDREY_API_KEY set

What Audrey deliberately does not do

Audrey does not upload your memory to a hosted service by default. It does not treat every sentence as permanent truth. It does not promote instructions from arbitrary tool output into trusted policy. It does not claim that a small local benchmark proves state-of-the-art memory quality.

Raw prompt events and tool bodies are not retained by default. Audrey stores hashes, bounded summaries, fingerprints, and redaction metadata. Explicit user-memory language is persisted intentionally; tool failure memories are sanitized first. Admin export/import/forget/promote surfaces are disabled unless AUDREY_ENABLE_ADMIN_TOOLS=1.

At-rest encryption, identity-bound tenant authorization, rate limiting, and regulated retention remain deployment responsibilities today. They are not hidden behind a “production ready” badge.

Why a team might actually want this

Fewer repeated mistakes

Guard checks memory at the point where it can change an action, not after the damage is done. Exact failure fingerprints avoid the noisy “one Bash command failed, so all Bash commands are suspicious” behavior.

Continuity across agent sessions

Audrey is not tied to one model vendor. Codex and Claude Code use the same memory runtime and the same evidence contract. MCP, REST, JavaScript, and Python clients make the core usable in custom agents too.

Evidence a human can inspect

Allow, warn, and block decisions carry receipts and evidence IDs. Outcome records connect back to those receipts. Teams can ask not only “what did the agent remember?” but “which memory changed this action, and was that useful?”

Local control

The default store is SQLite, FTS5, and sqlite-vec. Local embeddings are the default. Cloud embedding or LLM providers require explicit configuration.

A safer shared store

Agent-scoped recall now continues through validation, contradiction detection, interference, affect, failure lookup, capsules, greetings, Guard, and REST request routing. Hidden retrieval candidates do not reinforce themselves; only memories actually surfaced to the caller receive retrieval bookkeeping (usage count and last-reinforced timestamp for semantic and procedural memories). Explicit validation feedback (memory_validate / /v1/validate) separately adjusts salience based on how a memory actually performed, not merely on being recalled.

Vector candidates are partitioned by agent before nearest-neighbor ranking, so one busy agent cannot crowd another out of a bounded search. For hard tenant boundaries, still use a distinct AUDREY_DATA_DIR per tenant or security domain.

See it before installing anything

npm exec --yes --package=audrey -- audrey demo --scenario repeated-failure

That command runs from the npm cache, exercises the full SQLite-backed Guard loop, and leaves host configuration unchanged.

Where we want to take it

The ambition is a temporal evidence graph for agents: immutable observations, explicit validity windows, source trust, evolving claims, scoped procedures, and outcome-calibrated policy. The defensible part is not storing more text. It is knowing what was believed, why, in which context, for how long, and whether acting on it helped.

Near-term work includes durable background cognition jobs, tenant namespaces bound to credentials, memory quarantine and taint propagation, public long-horizon evaluations, encrypted backup options, and a persistent local daemon that removes per-hook model startup entirely.

If that is the kind of agent infrastructure you want to build, open an issue or start with the demo. Audrey is MIT licensed, and the product boundary is intentionally inspectable.

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Technical reference

Everything below is the machinery. The short version above is the product.

Requirements and packages

• Node.js 22.16+ (22.x) or 24+; Node 20 and 23 are no longer supported
• npm package: audrey
• Python client: audrey-memory
• Default storage: local SQLite + FTS5 + sqlite-vec
• Default embeddings: local 384-dimensional model

npm install audrey
pip install audrey-memory

Audrey uses node:sqlite; sqlite-vec ships its extension in platform packages. The local embedding runtime also includes its CPU binaries, so npm install --ignore-scripts audrey works. Keep optional dependencies enabled: they contain the platform files for sqlite-vec and sharp. GPU acceleration may require additional ONNX Runtime libraries for your platform. Some supported Node releases print an experimental SQLite warning at startup; it does not prevent operation.

For Autopilot, prefer a global or otherwise stable installation. Hook and MCP configuration pins the actual Node executable and Audrey entrypoint; an ephemeral npx cache is not a durable production runtime.

Host configuration

Preview or apply lifecycle hooks independently:

audrey hook-config claude-code
audrey hook-config claude-code --apply --scope local
audrey hook-config claude-code --apply --scope project
audrey hook-config claude-code --apply --scope user

audrey hook-config codex
audrey hook-config codex --apply --scope project
audrey hook-config codex --apply --scope user

Claude Code scope mapping follows the host’s terminology:

• local → .claude/settings.local.json
• project → .claude/settings.json
• user → ~/.claude/settings.json

Codex supports project .codex/hooks.json and user ~/.codex/hooks.json; it has no local hook scope. Audrey preserves unrelated hooks, replaces older Audrey-owned handlers, writes a private timestamped backup, and is idempotent on repeat installation. Project-adjacent backup names match *.audrey-*.bak; keep that pattern ignored because a host config can contain unrelated credentials.

Audrey respects CLAUDE_CONFIG_DIR and CODEX_HOME. Generated hooks pin the stable Node executable, Audrey entrypoint, data directory, agent identity, and non-secret provider choices used at install time. With local embeddings, an Autopilot install performs one warmup so the first real hook is not also the first model load; set AUDREY_DISABLE_WARMUP=1 to skip it.

Generate MCP configuration without applying it:

audrey mcp-config codex
audrey mcp-config generic
audrey mcp-config vscode

Remove Audrey-owned MCP registrations and hooks with the same host and scope you installed:

audrey uninstall --host auto --scope user
audrey uninstall --host claude-code --scope local
audrey uninstall --host codex --scope project

Add --dry-run to preview uninstall without changing either host. Add --mcp-only only when you intentionally want to preserve Audrey hooks.

Autopilot safety contract

The shared hook adapter normalizes current Codex and Claude Code payloads.

• Context injection is bounded by AUDREY_CONTEXT_BUDGET_CHARS (default 4000; Autopilot uses a conservative 3200-character packet unless overridden).
• Prompt and tool retrieval queries are bounded before embedding. Large edits carry hashes and lengths instead of file bodies; exact Guard identity uses a full redacted digest rather than a truncated prefix.
• The generated default hooks guard and observe Bash, Edit, MultiEdit, Write, NotebookEdit, apply_patch, and every mcp__* tool from connected MCP servers, excluding Audrey's own memory tools so the Guard never guards itself.
• A Bash command is only guarded when it can have side effects. A command whose every part is positively recognised as read-only (grep, ls, sed -n, git status, npm ls, and similar; no command substitution, no redirect except to /dev/null, no sudo, xargs, or eval) skips the preflight, and a non-zero exit from it is recorded but never treated as a failure to avoid. Anything the classifier does not recognise is guarded.
• A remembered Bash failure is matched to a proposed command by the verbs it runs (npm run deploy, git push), not by how similar the two command strings read.
• Pre/post correlation uses session_id + tool_use_id, so parallel tool calls do not attach to the wrong receipt.
• Claude PostToolUseFailure and Codex responses that explicitly expose a non-zero exit normalize to the same failure path. Current Codex hooks can omit Bash exit status; Audrey records an opaque result as unknown, never as invented success.
• On an internal error, every hook logs to stderr and emits {} (no opinion, so the tool proceeds). Only PreToolUse changes behavior under AUDREY_HOOK_FAIL_CLOSED=1, emitting a deny decision instead; context-injection and post-tool hooks have no deny path and always emit {}.
• Stop hooks always emit valid JSON and never continue or block a completed turn.

Codex hook interception is a guardrail, not a complete shell-policy boundary. The current host contract does not intercept every richer unified_exec path and may omit the exit status of silent Bash failures. See the Codex hooks documentation. Use the Guard receipt as evidence, and keep sandboxing, approvals, CI, and deployment controls in place.

JavaScript API

import { Audrey, MemoryController } from 'audrey';

const memory = new Audrey({
  dataDir: './audrey-data',
  agent: 'payments-agent',
  embedding: { provider: 'local', dimensions: 384 },
});

await memory.encode({
  content: 'Stripe returns HTTP 429 above 100 requests per second.',
  source: 'direct-observation',
  tags: ['stripe', 'rate-limit'],
  context: { service: 'billing' },
});

const capsule = await memory.capsule('increase Stripe throughput', {
  scope: 'agent',
  budgetChars: 3000,
});

const guard = new MemoryController(memory);
const before = await guard.beforeAction({
  action: 'deploy the billing worker',
  tool: 'Bash',
  command: 'npm run deploy:billing',
  cwd: process.cwd(),
});

console.log(before.decision, before.evidenceIds);
await memory.closeAsync();

REST sidecar

AUDREY_AGENT=payments-agent audrey serve
curl http://127.0.0.1:7437/health

Core routes: