iai-mcp: A local daemon for persistent OpenClaw memory across sessions

The recurring pain of starting a fresh OpenClaw session with zero context prompted one developer to build iai-mcp — a local daemon that persists conversation memory across sessions. Five months of daily use later, it's been open-sourced under MIT license.

How it works

• Three memory tiers: organizes captured conversations by recency and relevance, consolidating in the background when the machine is idle.
• Local neural embeddings: all processing happens on-device; no data sent externally.
• AES-256 encryption: data at rest is encrypted.
• Automatic context injection: on new session start, the relevant memory is fed as context — no need to manually ask OpenClaw to remember anything.

Performance numbers

• Verbatim recall above 99%
• Retrieval latency under 100ms
• Session-start token cost under 3,000 tokens

Real usage

The author has been running iai-mcp since January and reports that the system has learned coding style, project structures, and preferences without explicit instructions. The repository includes a benchmark harness to verify the numbers yourself.

Repository: https://github.com/CodeAbra/iai-mcp