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Cortex

A local-first second brain for AI sessions. Memory that survives compaction, follows you across projects, and stays under your control.

A capture-first inbox

Every session, decision, meeting, and stray idea lands in an append-only inbox as a raw event. Nothing is parsed at write time.

A normalization pipeline

Events get processed into atomic, addressable records. Routed into a PARA layout, indexed, deduped, and given stable IDs.

An MCP surface

Five operations — capture, recall, reflect, status, supersede — exposed to your AI tooling over MCP. No bespoke integration per client.

Hooks at the boundaries

Session start injects relevant memory. Pre-compact saves an emergency gist. Stop captures the session for later normalization.

These docs cover the architecture, the operations, and the concepts behind the design. They are not a getting-started guide — they are reference material for understanding why the system is shaped the way it is.