Jamgate

A neutral memory quality-gate for AI agents — a gate, not a store. One shared memory of you — who you are, how you're doing, what you're working on — that every AI agent reads from and writes to, kept honest at write time. Local-first, no cloud calls, one dependency.

claude mcp add jamgate -- npx jamgate

The problem: memory quality, not storage

You are one person, but every AI you use is a separate island. You design with one, research with another, code with a third — and none of them know what the others know, so you re-explain "what I'm working on" every time.

The tools that try to fix this mostly store everything, so shared memory bloats with junk: one production audit of a leading memory system found 97.8% of its stored entries were junk (source) — duplicates, trivia, one-off chatter, stale states. Sharing memory is the easy part. Keeping the shared memory clean and current is the unsolved part.

Jamgate sits in the write path and decides what deserves to be remembered, before it is stored:

                 without a gate                          with Jamgate
   ┌──────────────────────────────────┐   ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
   │ "remember I'm on a call"          │   │ ✗ rejected — not durable             │
   │ "I use Windows"  ← from 6mo ago   │   │ ⇄ superseded — "I use Linux" wins    │
   │ "I use Windows"  (again)          │   │ ✗ duplicate — already known          │
   │ "I use Linux"                     │   │ ✓ saved — durable, changes answers   │
   │ "my name is Sam" (agent guessed)  │   │ ⚠ conflict — lower trust, ask first  │
   └──────────────────────────────────┘   └──────────────────────────────────────┘
     everything piles up, 98% junk           small, current, trustworthy

The idea

Jamgate is one shared memory of you that every agent plugs into — kept honest by a quality gate. It runs as an MCP server, so any MCP-capable agent (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, …) connects to the same memory on your machine. Because it filters at write time, that memory stays small, accurate, and contradiction-free instead of bloating with junk.

Agent → [ Jamgate quality gate ] → local store (~/.jamgate/memory.json)
        save_memory / recall_memory / forget_memory

What it does — the gate layers

A memory is kept only if it is durable (still true after this session) and would change a future answer. The gate is a hybrid pipeline, cheapest checks first:

Everything is taggable, expirable, and deletable — you always see and control what's remembered.

Quick start

Jamgate runs locally — your memory never leaves your machine. Requires Node.js 20+. No install step: npx fetches and runs it on demand.

Claude Code

claude mcp add jamgate -- npx jamgate

Claude Desktop

Add to claude_desktop_config.json (Settings → Developer → Edit Config):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "jamgate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["jamgate"]
    }
  }
}

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json (or .cursor/mcp.json in a project):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "jamgate": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["jamgate"]
    }
  }
}

Restart the agent. It now has three tools:

• save_memory — store a durable fact. The gate rejects junk, drops exact duplicates, supersedes outdated facts by recency (pass a subject like operating-system so a newer fact retires the older one — or let the gate derive one), and refers trust conflicts back to you.
• recall_memory — fetch what's known, relevant to a query (active facts only).
• forget_memory — delete a memory by id.

Your memory lives in ~/.jamgate/memory.json. Same machine, every agent → one shared memory.

Optional: local semantic search

By default, recall is fuzzy lexical matching (stemming, typo-tolerance, trigrams) — fast, deterministic, and dependency-free, but blind to synonyms. To also match on meaning (so "automobile" recalls a memory about your "car"), install the optional embedding backend:

npm install @huggingface/transformers

On first use it downloads a small sentence-embedding model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2, ~23 MB, quantized) and runs it entirely on your machine — no text is ever sent to any cloud AI. With it enabled, recall blends semantic similarity into the ranking, and a save that is semantically near-identical to an existing memory comes back as a possible_duplicate for you to confirm. If the package isn't installed, Jamgate runs on fuzzy recall — nothing breaks.

Configuration

All configuration is via environment variables; every one has a sensible default.

How it compares

Jamgate is deliberately small and opinionated. It is not trying to be a hosted memory platform or a knowledge graph — it's the write-time quality layer those systems are weakest at, packaged as a drop-in local MCP server.

Mem0, OpenMemory, Zep, and Graphiti are capable systems built for different goals; if you need managed scale or graph reasoning, they're the right tool. Jamgate's bet is that for personal cross-agent memory, the hard part is quality at write time — and that it should be local, free, and one command to install.

Privacy

• Everything is local. The memory store, the gate, and (if enabled) the embedding model all run on your machine. Jamgate makes no network calls and talks to no cloud AI.
• The decision log is local too. Every gate decision (saved / duplicate / superseded / conflict / possible_duplicate / rejected, with its reason) is appended to ~/.jamgate/gate.log, a strictly local, size-capped JSONL file that rotates automatically and never leaves your machine. It exists to collect real usage data for a future local quality classifier. Disable it with JAMGATE_GATE_LOG=off.
• Nothing leaves the machine — no telemetry, no accounts, no keys.

Status

Early but real, and now installable with one command. The MVP core, robustness, and intelligence layers all work today (see CHANGELOG.md for the full 0.1.0 scope):

• Gate core — rule pre-filter, exact dedup, time-aware supersession, source-trust conflict guard, over a local flat-file store.
• Robustness — atomic durable writes, type-based expiry, concurrency-safe locking, automatic schema migration.
• Intelligence — trusted client provenance, fuzzy recall, optional local embeddings with graceful fallback, auto-subject derivation, local decision log.

Verified end-to-end over the MCP protocol and covered by an automated test suite (89 tests) on Node 20.x and 22.x. Next: a thin classifier for ambiguous cases (trained on the local decision log) and multi-device sync (see DECISIONS.md). Goal: impact, not profit — open-source (MIT), built in the open.

Development

npm install
npm run build   # compile TypeScript to dist/
npm test        # compile and run the test suite (built-in node:test, no extra deps)

CI runs the build and tests on Node 20.x and 22.x for every push and pull request.

Contributing

This is an impact project. The most valuable contributions are around write-time quality (selective capture, dedup, contradiction handling, expiry) — the part the whole field is weakest at. See AGENTS.md to get oriented, then RULES.md.

License

MIT