I reverse-engineered the three biggest agent-memory tools. Then I went back to markdown files and LLM wikis over Obsidian.
Summary
The author reverse-engineered three major agent-memory tools and concluded that markdown files and LLM wikis in Obsidian are preferable.
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@mylifcc: Recently while working on Agent memory and personal knowledge systems, I discovered this project obsidian-wiki, so fitting! It brings Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern to Obsidian: enabling AI Agents to autonomously inges…
This tweet introduces the obsidian-wiki project, which implements Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki pattern on Obsidian, allowing AI Agents to autonomously ingest multi-source knowledge and organize it into a wikilink-interconnected markdown knowledge base. It supports Delta incremental updates and source attribution (provenance), and has built-in features like query, audit, graph export, etc. Currently at 2k stars.
I asked if a local-first Markdown memory server existed. You gave me ~20 suggestions. Here's what I found after going through all of them.
A comprehensive review of local-first AI agent memory systems, comparing options like mem0, Hindsight, and mnem, ultimately recommending Engram for its unique combination of local storage and human-readable Markdown files.
I thought markdown memory would be enough for agents. It turned into prompt debt.
The author reflects on the limitations of using flat markdown files for long-term agent memory, which leads to prompt debt as the memory grows, and advocates for graph-based memory representations that retrieve relevant context dynamically.
@kepochnik: https://x.com/kepochnik/status/2071915153957011826
Hermes Agent v0.14 integrates with Obsidian vault to provide persistent, inspectable memory for AI agents, using plain markdown files instead of vector databases.
I ran 8 AI agent memory systems through 2176 tasks and a plain markdown wiki beat every product.
A developer ran 2,176 tasks across 8 AI agent memory systems and found that a plain markdown wiki curated by the agent outperformed every commercial product, with Mitosis Cortex as the best hosted option.