rmbr

Give your agent memory and knowledge. One file, three lines, no server, no API key.

rmbr ("remember", vowels deleted) is an embedded, local-first memory + retrieval engine for AI agents and LLM apps — what SQLite is to Postgres, rmbr aims to be to hosted memory services.

v0.1.1. pip install rmbr gets you a working library: Memory, Index, Policy, and MCP support (below), all implemented and tested — see docs/PLAN.md and docs/ARCHITECTURE.md for the design.

Why

Agents can already "remember" things across restarts — a CLAUDE.md, a system prompt, a JSON file on disk. That's not new, and rmbr isn't claiming otherwise.

What breaks is what happens as that file grows. Every fact in a static context file costs tokens on every single call, whether it's relevant to the current task or not — so it either stays small (a few dozen hand-curated notes) or turns into noise nobody's cheaply reading anymore. There's no ranking: the agent gets the whole file, or nothing, never just the 5 facts that actually matter for this turn. A static file gets more expensive and less useful the more the agent learns; a searchable memory gets more useful and stays the same cost per call. mem.recall(query) returns the k most relevant memories out of however many thousand you've accumulated — that's the actual gap between "an agent that can write to a file" and "an agent with memory."

The other place people get burned: rolling this yourself. Chunk text, embed it, throw it in a vector store — that's a legitimately easy weekend project (this one started that way too). What's easy to get wrong in that weekend project: real hybrid search (most ship vector-only or keyword-only and never notice), an embedding cache (so you're not re-embedding — and re-paying for — the same text on every call), and, if there's more than one agent involved, safe isolation between them. Most hand-rolled or framework-provided multi-agent memory either shares one blob every agent can read and write, or scopes access via a namespace/user_id parameter the calling model itself supplies — which a prompt injection can simply ask to change. rmbr's MCP tools don't expose that parameter at all; there's no field for an injected instruction to fill in.

So: rmbr exists for the gap between "stuff it in a system prompt" (doesn't scale past a few KB) and "stand up real infrastructure" (Docker, a graph database, a hosted API key) — search-quality, safely-isolated memory, as a dependency, not a service.

Concretely, rmbr gives you:

• One file. Your agent's entire memory and knowledge base is a single .db file — git commit it, diff it, roll it back, hand it to a teammate, attach it to a bug report, or check a known-good state into a test fixture for deterministic CI. No hosted memory service lets you do any of that.
• Three lines. pip install rmbr, import, remember. No account, no config, no service.
• No added infrastructure. Your agent already needs a network connection and an API key for its LLM calls — rmbr doesn't add a second one just for memory. mem0 defaults to a hosted LLM+embedding API, Zep needs Docker+Neo4j+an LLM key, Letta needs a server+Postgres — all on top of whatever you're already paying for the model itself. rmbr's own memory/retrieval path makes zero network calls by default: one less vendor, one less key to leak, one less service whose outage takes your agent's memory down with it. (It also means rmbr keeps working with a fully local LLM — Ollama, llama.cpp — for genuinely offline or air-gapped use; most people won't need that, but it's there.)
• No proprietary format. rmbr never calls an LLM itself — recall()/search() return plain strings, floats, and dicts (hit.text, hit.score, hit.metadata). Nothing to parse, no vendor SDK required to consume it — see Using results with an LLM below for how that plugs into Claude, GPT, or Gemini identically.
• Namespace-pinned multi-agent access. Policy is deny-by-default; MCP tools expose no namespace parameter to override — safe by construction, not by convention.

Quickstart

from rmbr import Memory

mem = Memory("agents.db", namespace="assistant")
mem.remember("user prefers dark mode and short answers")
mem.recall("user preferences")

Three lines — that's the whole API for the common case. Everything below is opt-in and lives in its own section, so you only read what you actually need. Library-only by design — no CLI to learn. (python -m rmbr exists solely so MCP clients can launch the server; see MCP support below.)

Indexing documents (RAG)

from rmbr import Index

idx = Index("agents.db")
idx.add_files("docs/")                     # .py, .md, and plain text each get an appropriate splitter automatically
hits = idx.search("how do I deploy?", k=5)
hits[0].text, hits[0].score, hits.timings  # per-stage latency, always visible

Index and Memory share the same .db file — open both against the same path if your agent needs a knowledge base and a memory. add_files()/add_texts() return an IngestResult: a plain list of document ids with a .timings breakdown attached (chunk_ms/embed_ms/store_ms/ann_ms/docs_per_second) — the same transparency hits.timings gives you for search, applied to ingestion, so you can see for yourself that embedding dominates the cost rather than take our word for it.

Using results with an LLM

rmbr never calls a model — search()/recall() hand you back plain text and a score, and you decide what to do with it. The standard pattern (classic RAG: retrieve, then inject the retrieved text into the prompt) with Claude:

from anthropic import Anthropic
from rmbr import Index

idx = Index("agents.db")
idx.add_files("docs/")

client = Anthropic()  # reads ANTHROPIC_API_KEY from the environment

def answer(question: str) -> str:
    hits = idx.search(question, k=5)
    context = "\n\n".join(f"<document>{hit.text}</document>" for hit in hits)
    response = client.messages.create(
        model="claude-sonnet-5",
        max_tokens=1024,
        # Context before the question, not after — Anthropic's own prompting
        # docs measure this ordering as meaningfully better for long-context
        # RAG, though it isn't required for correctness.
        messages=[{"role": "user", "content": f"{context}\n\nUsing the documents above, answer: {question}"}],
    )
    return response.content[0].text

answer("how do I deploy?")

This isn't Claude-specific. hit.text is a plain Python string with no wrapper, no provider object, nothing rmbr-proprietary — the exact same context string above drops verbatim into OpenAI's messages array (client.chat.completions.create(model=..., messages=[...])) or Gemini's contents. Every mainstream chat-completion API takes the same fundamental shape (a list of role-tagged text messages), which is why "retrieve text, put it in the prompt" — the only integration contract rmbr makes — works identically across providers. Swap the SDK call, nothing else changes.

Want the embedding itself to come from OpenAI instead of the local default? Memory("agents.db", namespace="assistant", embedder=OpenAIEmbedder()) (pip install rmbr[openai]) — same Embedder protocol, same rest of the API.

Restricting access between agents

from rmbr import Memory, Policy

policy = Policy()
policy.allow("supervisor", read="*")  # supervisor can read every namespace

mem = Memory("agents.db", namespace="coder", policy=policy)

Deny-by-default: coder can only read/write its own namespace unless explicitly granted. See Multi-agent isolation below for the full model, the security reasoning, and a diagram of a real team topology.

Async, for web backends and concurrent agents

Every read and write has an a-prefixed async twin — aremember/arecall/aforget on Memory, aadd_text/aadd_texts/aadd_files/asearch on Index — for async def route handlers (FastAPI, Starlette, aiohttp) where a blocking call stalls every other request on the same event loop:

from fastapi import FastAPI
from rmbr import Memory

app = FastAPI()
mem = Memory("agents.db", namespace="assistant")

@app.post("/chat")
async def chat(message: str):
    context = await mem.arecall(message, k=5)
    await mem.aremember(f"user said: {message}")
    return {"context": [hit.text for hit in context]}

Or fan a supervisor out across several granted namespaces concurrently instead of one at a time:

import asyncio

coder_notes, researcher_notes = await asyncio.gather(
    supervisor.arecall("release blockers", namespaces="coder"),
    supervisor.arecall("release blockers", namespaces="researcher"),
)

One honestly-stated limitation: async calls on the same Memory/Index instance are serialized behind an internal lock, reads included. That's deliberate — the vector index (usearch) isn't documented as safe for concurrent mutation from multiple threads, and a corrupted index is a far worse failure than giving up some read concurrency. Open separate instances against the same file for true parallelism; SQLite's WAL mode supports that fine.

Serving memory over MCP

from rmbr import serve_mcp

serve_mcp("agents.db", namespace="coder", read_only=True)

See MCP support below for what this exposes and how to actually connect a client to it.

Contributing / running from source

git clone https://github.com/SRock44/rmbr.git
cd rmbr
python -m venv .venv && source .venv/bin/activate   # .venv\Scripts\activate on Windows
pip install --only-binary :all: -e .
pytest tests/    # 129 tests, no network or API key required

The default embedder (fastembed, a local ONNX model) downloads its model weights on first use. Every test in tests/ instead uses rmbr.embed.FakeEmbedder — a deterministic, dependency-free embedder — so the suite runs fully offline; you can inject the same FakeEmbedder into your own tests via Memory(..., embedder=FakeEmbedder()) / Index(..., embedder=FakeEmbedder()).

Multi-agent isolation, honestly stated

• Namespaces keep agents' memories separate and are enforced on every call — but they are organizational, not cryptographic. Any code with access to the file can open the file. That's true of every embedded database; we say it out loud.
• Hard isolation = separate .db files per trust boundary, plus OS file permissions.
• MCP serving is namespace-pinned: the exposed tools have no namespace parameter, so an external agent structurally cannot query outside its lane — unlike every other MCP memory server we looked at, where the scope is a parameter the calling model supplies (and could be talked into changing).

A concrete team topology — one supervisor with a broad grant, two specialists that can't see each other, one external MCP client pinned to a single lane, all in the same agents.db file:

flowchart TB
    subgraph db["agents.db — one SQLite file"]
        direction LR
        supNS[("supervisor<br/>namespace")]
        coderNS[("coder<br/>namespace")]
        researchNS[("researcher<br/>namespace")]
    end

    supervisor["Supervisor agent<br/>policy.allow('supervisor', read='*')"] ==>|read + write| supNS
    supervisor -.->|read, explicitly granted| coderNS
    supervisor -.->|read, explicitly granted| researchNS

    coder["Coder agent<br/>Memory(path, namespace='coder')"] ==>|read + write| coderNS
    researcher["Researcher agent<br/>Memory(path, namespace='researcher')"] ==>|read + write| researchNS

    external["External MCP client<br/>(Claude Code, Cursor, ...)"] -->|"serve_mcp(path, namespace='coder')"| coderNS

The coder and researcher namespaces have no path between them on this diagram — that's the point, not an omission. Nothing needed to be configured to deny that access; only the supervisor's grant (read="*") is explicit. The external MCP client's tool schema has no namespace argument at all, so it structurally cannot ask for anything outside coder, no matter what a document it's summarizing tells it to try.

MCP support

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an open, model-agnostic protocol for connecting AI applications — Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and a growing list of others — to external tools and data sources through one standard interface, instead of every app inventing its own plugin format. rmbr speaks MCP so any MCP-capable client can search and remember through your .db file directly, without you writing a server yourself.

What serve_mcp() exposes

from rmbr import serve_mcp

serve_mcp("agents.db", namespace="coder")                  # read + write
serve_mcp("agents.db", namespace="coder", read_only=True)  # read only

Three tools, all pinned to whatever namespace you pass at startup (see Multi-agent isolation above for why there's no namespace parameter for a client to override):

• search(query, k=5) — hybrid search over documents added via Index
• recall(query, k=5) — search over notes saved via Memory
• remember(text) — save a new memory. Not present in the tool list at all — not just permission-denied — when read_only=True.

Connecting a client

serve_mcp() blocks on stdio; it's meant to be launched as a subprocess by an MCP client, not called from inside your own long-running app. python -m rmbr is the launch shim for exactly that (the package also installs a rmbr console script pointing at the same thing, so uvx rmbr works without a local install):

python -m rmbr agents.db --namespace coder --read-only
# or, via the installed console script / uvx:
rmbr agents.db --namespace coder --read-only

For Claude Desktop or Claude Code, add it to your MCP config (Claude Desktop's claude_desktop_config.json, or a project's .mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "rmbr-coder": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["rmbr", "/absolute/path/to/agents.db", "--namespace", "coder", "--read-only"]
    }
  }
}

Restart the client and its tool list picks up search/recall (and remember, unless read-only) scoped to that one namespace. The rest of the file — every other agent's memory — isn't reachable through this connection; there's no parameter that would let it be.

Alternatives

Not "competitors" — genuinely different tools for genuinely different jobs. Here's where each one actually fits, including where rmbr isn't the right choice.

If you're evaluating a memory service (mem0, Zep/Graphiti, Letta): all three are excellent at LLM-mediated memory intelligence — extracting facts from conversation, resolving contradictions, consolidating duplicates. rmbr deliberately does none of that; it never calls an LLM, full stop. That's a real capability gap, not spin — but it's also why rmbr has no API key requirement, no extra LLM cost or latency on every remember(), and no risk of a consolidation model quietly rewriting what you actually said. You get the primitives (remember/recall/forget, namespace policy); you decide what, if anything, sits on top.

(GitHub stars as of this writing, for scale: mem0 ~62k, Graphiti ~29k, Letta ~24k. This is a much larger, faster-moving category than rmbr is part of — worth knowing going in.)

If you're evaluating a vector database (Chroma, LanceDB, pgvector, Pinecone, ...): these are real peers on "embedded, no API key" — Chroma and LanceDB in particular are just as zero-server as rmbr. The difference is what's built on top of the vector index: with a raw vector database you're still building the memory API, the namespace/access-control layer, the hybrid BM25+vector fusion, the embedding cache, and an MCP server yourself. rmbr ships all of that already assembled, specifically for the agent-memory shape of problem.

Where they legitimately win: raw bulk-ingestion throughput at large scale. If you're indexing millions of documents for a dedicated search product, use a purpose-built vector database — that's their job, not rmbr's. rmbr is tuned for what an agent's own memory and knowledge base actually looks like (its own history, a knowledge base in the hundreds-to-low-thousands of chunks), where single-call latency, not bulk-loading speed, is what you actually pay for on every turn. See Performance below for the honest numbers on both.

Performance

This README will never contain a performance number that isn't produced by a script in bench/ — reproducible by anyone, on disclosed hardware, methodology included.

The number that matters for rmbr's actual usage pattern — an agent calling remember()/search() one at a time mid-reasoning-loop, not bulk-loading a corpus — is single-call latency with the real default embedder, not bulk throughput. That's what's below, run on the project's pinned Ubuntu benchmark machine (Intel Core Ultra 9 285K, 4 cores isolated via taskset -c 0-3, Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS, Python 3.12.3), median of 3 runs, 100 samples/run:

Read that last row carefully: ~85-90% of a search call's cost is the embedding model, not rmbr. rmbr's own storage/retrieval overhead is sub-millisecond. And all of this is imperceptible next to the LLM call that will follow it in any real agent loop — which was rmbr's founding thesis about where RAG latency actually lives (see docs/PLAN.md). Reproduce: python bench/latency.py; raw output for all 3 runs is in bench/pinned/.

Bulk-ingest throughput, for full transparency (not a claim we're leading with): rmbr batches every write in add_texts()/add_files() into one SQLite transaction, one embedder call, and one ANN-index insert for the whole batch, rather than once per document — a real, measured improvement from 950 to ~3,000 docs/s on a 5,000-doc synthetic corpus. Note what didn't move much: batching the embed call barely helped in this specific benchmark, because it feeds every engine identical precomputed vectors (a near-free dict lookup) specifically to isolate storage/ANN performance — a real embedder (ONNX inference, or an API call) has real fixed per-call overhead that batching actually amortizes, so bench/latency.py's numbers above are the more representative ones for real-world embedding cost. Even after this, rmbr is still slower at pure bulk loading than both purpose-built alternatives: Chroma ingests ~2.6x faster (~7,850 docs/s) and LanceDB ~20-55x faster (~65,000-165,000 docs/s, wide variance across runs), because that's a fundamentally different job (one Arrow batch write, zero per-row relational bookkeeping, in LanceDB's case) than what rmbr is built for. What rmbr does hold its own on: recall@5 (0.95) is competitive with LanceDB's exact search (1.0) and ahead of Chroma's (0.80). Full numbers, all 3 seeds, in bench/pinned/ and reproducible via pip install -e ".[bench]" && python bench/run.py. We're disclosing this, not hiding it: if bulk document loading at scale is your actual workload, see Alternatives above — that's not what rmbr optimizes for.

Why bge-small-en-v1.5 is still the default

We tested. bench/quality.py measures recall@1 on 150 hand-written (query, correct passage, distractors) examples — 50 each spanning remembered preferences, documentation, and code, the actual shapes of content rmbr indexes — against every same-size-class local embedding model fastembed supports, plus bge-base-en-v1.5 as a "what does 3x the size buy you" reference point:

Nothing in bge-small's own size class beats it with any real confidence — the alternatives above land within about a point of it, which is noise at this sample size. The only model that wins by a real margin is bge-base-en-v1.5: +7.3 points recall@1, at a real, measured cost — 3x the download (210MB) and ~3.9x the per-embed latency (7.5ms vs 1.9ms p50, both still small in absolute terms). We tested that tradeoff and kept the smaller, faster model as the default; if you want the quality bump and don't mind the size, it's a one-line change:

from rmbr.embed import FastEmbedEmbedder
mem = Memory("agents.db", namespace="assistant", embedder=FastEmbedEmbedder(model_name="BAAI/bge-base-en-v1.5"))

Full data and every candidate's per-category breakdown: python bench/quality.py --models candidates.

Roadmap

• v0.1 (done in this repo, not yet released to PyPI) — Memory + Policy + Index (hybrid BM25 + vector search, metadata filtering), embedding + semantic query caches, MCP support (namespace-pinned), 3-OS CI (Linux/Windows/macOS), true batch ingestion with per-stage timings, async API surface (a-prefixed methods), a Python-aware chunker (stdlib ast, no added dependency), one hosted embedding provider (OpenAI), a 150-example quality eval that confirmed the default embedder against local alternatives, real single-call and bulk benchmark numbers, PyPI trusted publishing
• Known gaps — Voyage/Cohere embedding providers (same Embedder protocol as OpenAIEmbedder, not yet written), more auto-detected chunkers (currently text/markdown/python)
• Next — cut the v0.1.0 release

License

MIT