Mneme: A Free, Local-First Claude Chat Client with Persistent Memory
Mneme is a personal Claude chat client that runs on your own machine, talks to the Anthropic API directly, and bakes memory into every surface from the start — not as an afterthought. Because it uses the API, Sonnet 4.5 is still available in the model picker, even after Anthropic removed it from claude.ai.
The app is free (you pay Anthropic and OpenAI for API usage — roughly $3–$8/mo on Haiku for light use, $30–$60 on Sonnet for moderate-to-high use). No subscription to Mneme itself. Setup is 10–20 minutes, including a PDF guide that Claude can walk you through step-by-step.
Key Features
- Tiered memory: Messages flow from episodic → narrative → entity summaries as relevance shifts; old context is compressed without being lost
- Daily summaries: A 7-day rolling timeline so Claude knows recent context, not just semantically similar matches
- Entity tracking: Hierarchical summaries for people, projects, and things you refer to often
- Narrative concepts: Keyword-triggered recall for ideas you've named
- AI Notes: A persistent section Claude can write to itself between conversations
- Extended thinking, file attachments, text-to-speech
- Command system:
@run,artifact, etc. - Autonomous Python retrieval: The AI can agentically use retrieval if automatic mode fails
- Dynamic context with caching: Every message can have different retrieval without breaking Anthropic's context caching
Technical Details
- Open source (CC BY 4.0)
- Local-first — all data stored in a SQLite database on your machine
- Tested on Windows (one-click installer); Android browser access via local server/Tailscale; iPhone should work; macOS not yet packaged
- Aimed at "journal with an AI" use case (thinking out loud, processing your week) rather than coding agents or RAG over docs
Who It's For
Developers and power users who want a Claude client with persistent, intelligent memory that runs locally and still works with Sonnet 4.5.
📖 Read the full source: r/ClaudeAI
👀 See Also
Open-source local hook automatically switches Claude models to cut AI costs
A developer created a local hook for Cursor and Claude Code that analyzes prompts and automatically selects the appropriate Claude model (Haiku, Sonnet, or Opus) before sending requests. The tool uses keyword rules to classify tasks and block overpaying scenarios, with retroactive analysis showing 50-70% cost reduction.
Token Reducer: A Claude Code Plugin for Intelligent Context Compression
Token Reducer is a Claude Code plugin that processes repository context locally to reduce token usage by 90-98% using AST-based chunking, hybrid retrieval, and TextRank compression. It's MIT licensed and available via the plugin marketplace.
SkyClaw v2.2 Rust AI Agent Runtime Adds OpenAI OAuth and Custom Tool Authoring
SkyClaw v2.2 introduces OpenAI OAuth authentication using ChatGPT Plus/Pro subscriptions, custom tool authoring where agents write their own bash/python/node tools at runtime, and daemon mode for background operation. The Rust-based runtime benchmarks at 31ms cold start, 15MB idle RAM, and 9.3MB binary size.
git-courer: An MCP Server That Forces AI Agents to Write Proper Git Commit Messages
git-courer is a local MCP server in Go that intercepts diffs from AI coding agents and translates them into structured, human-readable commit messages with WHY and WHAT sections.