Changelog

Version 0.19.0 — Trust, accounting, and safety net

August 2026

This release makes the memories you rely on more trustworthy, your spend more transparent, and your data safer to lose.

• Backups. Everything irreplaceable — memories, identity, state — packs into one consistent archive: hicortex backup. Runs nightly on its own; point backupCommand at rclone, Backblaze, or anything else to ship copies offsite automatically.
• Decisions are decisions. The distiller no longer records an AI's suggestion as a decision you made — only choices you actually confirm become decisions. Proposals land as experience ("AI proposed X, you declined"), so recall no longer surfaces contradictions with equal standing.
• Honest token accounting. The usage meter now always reflects true spend (distillation + consolidation), with a usage gauge against your configured monthly cap.
• Clearer standing instructions. The guidance your agents receive at session start now frames Hicortex as your agents' persistent identity and memory — what they learn, decide, and correct survives every session and model switch.
• Better console. Your account identity appears across every console page, the cold-memory stat is labelled honestly as "never recalled", and remote dashboard access got simpler and safer.
• Reliability. Scheduled capture hardened again (path resolution on more install types), plus internal limits that keep heavy usage from degrading other tenants on shared deployments.

Version 0.18.3 — Capture reliability fix

August 2026

A critical fix for a silent capture failure that could affect global installs made with bun, pnpm, or yarn — plus opt-in infrastructure for self-hosting providers.

• Fixed: scheduled capture could die silently. On some installs the scheduled nightly/capture agent couldn't find node and failed at startup with no visible error — memory stopped being captured without any signal in hicortex status (the shell PATH masked it). The supervisor now resolves node correctly (including Apple Silicon Homebrew and bun/pnpm/yarn globals), and init now warns at install time if the scheduled agent can't run. If you installed with bun, pnpm, or yarn, re-run npx @gamaze/hicortex init to regenerate the schedule.
• Hosted-service infrastructure (opt-in, default off). Added the building blocks to run Hicortex as a multi-tenant service — a token-routing proxy, per-tenant Docker isolation, per-tenant cost budgets, and rate limiting. Inert unless hostedMode is enabled; no effect on existing self-hosted installs.

Version 0.18.2 — Unified Terminology

August 2026

A vocabulary refresh to match what Hicortex actually does: give agents a persistent identity, not just a memory store.

• Context Layer → Agent Identity. The hand-edited "who you are + how to work" layer is now called the identity layer. Same mechanism, sharper name. The CLI is hicortex identity show|edit; the endpoint is /identity (with /context kept as a backcompat alias); files live at ~/.hicortex/identity/; config keys are identityClients and identityAgents (old keys still accepted).
• Human type names. The four memory types are now shown as Knowledge, Experience, Decisions, and Learnings across docs and UI. The internal memory_type enum is unchanged — only the labels you see changed.
• Auto-migration. Existing installs: your ~/.hicortex/context/ directory is automatically renamed to ~/.hicortex/identity/ on the next server boot or nightly run. If both exist, they merge additively (identity wins per-section, legacy-only sections preserved). No data is lost. Old config keys (contextClients/contextAgents) and the /context endpoint continue to work as aliases.
• Security hardening. Secrets are scrubbed server-side on /distill (not just client-side). The public /health endpoint returns only {status:"ok"} — diagnostics moved to an authed /health/detail. Token comparison is constant-time; a second token (authTokenPrevious) enables zero-downtime rotation. Consolidation-budget exhaustion surfaces on the dashboard. Nightly self-capture now sends the auth token instead of relying solely on the localhost bypass.

Version 0.17 — Agents that dream

August 2026

The biggest release since launch. Your agents now capture what they experience during the day, distill and consolidate it overnight, and wake up wiser — without you babysitting the schedule.

• Capture that heals itself. A new capture watchdog checks every ~20 minutes whether there’s anything new to capture and whether the server is reachable, then runs only when it makes sense (throttled to ~4 runs per day by default). The practical effect: if a laptop wakes and its network takes a moment to reconnect, capture retries in minutes instead of silently skipping a whole day.
• One model, simpler setup. The whole pipeline — distilling sessions, scoring importance, classifying domains, and extracting lessons — now runs on a single model you pick at install time. No more per-stage model configuration to maintain. Upgraders from 0.16.7 or earlier see a one-time warning naming any obsolete keys.
• Hermes conversations captured. Interactive Discord threads on Hermes were previously invisible to capture (they never formally “ended”). Those live conversations — the ones with the actual back-and-forth — are now captured and distilled like everything else.
• Memory analytics dashboard. A new view-only /dashboard page shows the health of your agents’ memory: growth over time, domain composition, how often surfaced memories are actually used. The headline metric is uses-per-showing — are the memories we surface the ones the agent reaches for?
• Sharper lessons, leaner prompts. Lesson generation now demands a transferable principle (not a one-off incident), and the lesson cap dropped to 10 by default — a focused, session-relevant digest instead of a generic dump.
• Memories that know what they are. Distilled memories are now classified as episodes, facts, or decisions at extraction time — not lumped together as “episodes.” Facts (durable truths) score higher and persist; one-off events fade. A one-time classify-types command reclassifies existing memories.
• Your brain has a capacity. A configurable soft cap (default 10,000 memories) bounds the corpus: when full, the least-useful memories make room for new ones. Shown on the dashboard as a capacity gauge.
• Token usage visibility. Every LLM call now reports real token counts (not estimates). The dashboard shows per-stage token consumption per month; an optional fair-use cap throttles consolidation when exceeded.
• One console, all the tools. The server’s pages (dashboard, knowledge graph, context editor) now share a navigation bar with a consistent dark design. http://your-server:8787/ takes you straight to the dashboard.
• Fix. The classify-types --all command no longer reclassifies lesson memories — lessons are owned by the reflection stage and are now excluded from its scope.

Version 0.16.2 — Simpler privacy, agent provenance

August 2026

• Privacy is about where, not code. Sensitive agents should run against their own Hicortex server (a separate database) instead of sharing one store with privacy enforced in software. We removed the experimental in-app filtering — it was fragile, because every read path had to remember to enforce it, and a separate server is both simpler and more trustworthy. Point a private agent at its own server with init --server <url>.
• Every memory now carries its origin agent. Each client gets a stable ID at init, and captured memories record which agent made them — so attribution survives renames and stays honest.
• Agents can declare their topic. A client can set a sourceDomain in its config and every memory it captures is stamped with it — useful provenance alongside the content-based classification.
• Cleanup. Removed a dead privacy tag the distiller used to emit (it was never read) and a "compartment" override that forced a domain to be primary regardless of relevance — primaries are now pure relevance-ranked. The privacy filter is gone too (it could only ever match one value and silently returned nothing otherwise); for keeping areas apart, run a separate server.

Recall tuning — leaner, more precise memory blocks

Recall index lines are shorter (100 chars) and blocks carry fewer entries (5, down from 6), so you see less noise per prompt. A higher similarity floor means a prompt with nothing genuinely relevant now more often gets no memory block — by design (noise is worse than silence); the memories that do surface are higher-precision. New memories are also captured topic-first (the subject leads the line), so they're findable by topic instead of by tone. Driven by the full-corpus relevance eval.

Version 0.16 — Recall scoping & honest citations

August 2026

• Recall respects your scope. Working in one project, recall now boosts that project's and domain's memories instead of flooding you with same-word hits from unrelated projects (boat-electrics no longer surface when you ask about your MacBook battery). Nothing is excluded — it just ranks right. Coding agents derive the scope from the working directory; Hermes agents declare their domain.
• Smarter keyword matching. The search index now knows which project and domain each memory belongs to, so a match on the project or domain field outranks a body-only keyword hit. Cross-scope noise on exact shared words drops to near zero.
• Honest citations. A cited memory is now marked FETCHED (the agent read it in full) or SNIPPET (it only saw the one-line index entry) — so evidence was actually read, and one that wasn't is clearly labelled.
• Provenance on every entry. Each recall line shows its origin agent and project, so it's clear whether a memory is from your session or another agent's before you act on it.
• Cleanup & fixes. Removed two retired install commands (/learn, /hicortex-activate); init now clears stale copies. Fixed a broken plugin-manifest reference and brought the citation marker to the Claude Code fetch path it had missed.
• Security: cross-origin lockout. The server no longer lets arbitrary web pages read or change your memory store through its localhost port — only origins you explicitly allow. Closes a real data-exposure path on self-hosted setups.
• Reversed facts retire. When a plain fact is updated (not just decisions), the old value is now demoted in recall — it ranks below its replacement instead of competing with it.

Version 0.15.3 — Session-aware recall

July 2026

• Recall follows the session. The per-prompt recall index now blends your current prompt with a rolling sense of what the conversation is about, so rephrasing stops pulling in off-topic memories. Tunable via sessionIntentWeight (set 0 to disable).
• Gentler fetch nudge. The index now suggests fetching a memory's full content when it could change your action — less conservative, so fewer relevant memories go unread.

Version 0.15 — Dedup, supersession & ranking

July 2026

• Duplicate detection. A nightly pass finds and merges near-duplicate memories, so your memory bank tightens over time instead of fragmenting.
• Reversed decisions stop ranking. When a newer memory supersedes an older one, the old one is demoted in recall but never deleted — searchable, no longer outranking what replaced it.
• Smarter ranking, all tunable. Similarity, strength, connections, and recency are config keys. A new fresh-memory window briefly boosts recently captured content so yesterday's work surfaces today, then decays into long-term ranking.
• Transparent telemetry. An anonymous nightly ping reports aggregate usage; a new hicortex telemetry command shows exactly what is sent. Opt out anytime.

Version 0.14 — Per-prompt recall & provenance

July 2026

• Per-prompt memory recall. Every prompt gets a compact index of relevant memories — one line each — and the agent loads full content only when one matters. Works across Claude Code, Hermes, and OpenClaw.
• Exposure vs use. Appearing in the index marks a memory shown; fetching it marks it used. Importance follows what agents actually use.
• Built-in provenance. Memories that shape an answer carry their origin (id, date), so influence is visible in the transcript.
• Gentler decay. Default half-life about one year (was ~4 months), tunable.
• All tuning is config — recall breadth, floors, timing, decay. No release needed to calibrate.

Version 0.13.0 — Per-agent context

July 2026

• Per-agent standing context. Agents on the same server can each have their own context alongside the shared global one. Drop Markdown into ~/.hicortex/context/agents/<id>/ to override an agent.
• Hermes and OpenClaw receive the context layer, scoped per profile/agent.
• Claude Code stays global by default — opt a machine into its own identity with hicortex init --agent-name <name>.

Version 0.12.1 — Install fix

• Fixed: npx client installs no longer break silently. Re-run init (or upgrade) if you installed 0.12.0 as a client.

Version 0.12.0 — Context layer

July 2026

• Context layer. A hand-edited "who you are + how to work" layer alongside auto-distilled memories — Markdown injected every session, never distilled or decayed.
• Breaking rename: the recall tool hicortex_context is now hicortex_recent. Upgrade the server before its clients.

Version 0.11.0 — Memory visualization & self-organizing domains

July 2026

• Memory graph at /viz — domains as clusters, relationships as edges, hubs highlighted. Filter, search, click any node. Served by your own server.
• Multi-tag domains. Define your knowledge spheres; every memory files into all that apply, weighted from your data, one primary. No "Unsorted" pile.
• Self-tuning classification — domain profiles recompute nightly from your data.
• Smarter links across the bank, plus hicortex relink to back-fill.

Version 0.10.0 — License change, all features free

July 2026

• PolyForm Noncommercial license — personal and noncommercial use free with the full feature set; commercial use is per-seat.
• All tiers and gates removed — no memory cap, no feature differences.
• Per-install auth token generated at init.
• User-chosen LLM — init lists detected options, you pick.

Version 0.9.0 — Thin-client capture

June 2026

• New capture model. Clients no longer run local LLM distillation — the nightly denoises locally (no LLM) and sends to the server, which does all the LLM work. Raw content never leaves the machine.
• Strict by default — if the server is unreachable, the nightly retries rather than silently degrading.
• Hermes sessions captured alongside Claude Code.

Version 0.8.0 — Hermes support

• Hermes recall plugin — lessons at session start, search and recent-memory tools in-process. hermes memory setup hicortex.
• Multi-machine deployment validated (one server, networked thin clients).

Version 0.7.0 — Graph Intelligence

April 2026

• Community detection finds knowledge domains from the memory graph automatically.
• Hub detection boosts highly-connected memories.
• New hicortex_graph tool — connected memories, hubs, shortest paths.

Version 0.6.0 — Knowledge Domain Routing

April 2026

• Memories auto-group into knowledge domains; agents see a structured domain index, not a flat project list.
• Same-domain lessons boosted during injection.
• New hicortex_index tool to query domains.

Version 0.5.3 — Security & Quality

April 2026

• Pre-ingestion redaction scrubs keys, tokens, paths, and secrets before storage.
• Contradiction detection suppresses new lessons that conflict with existing ones.
• Anonymous usage telemetry (opt-out).

Version 0.5.0 — Pi Agent Support

April 2026

• Pi coding agent support — nightly distillation reads Pi sessions alongside Claude Code.
• MCP tools via pi-mcp-adapter.

Version 0.4.6 — Nightly Data-Loss Fix

April 2026

• Fixed: the nightly silently lost sessions when the distillation LLM was unreachable. Now retries cleanly and advances only when every session is processed.

Version 0.4.5 — Public Release

April 2026

• Client now source-available at github.com/gamaze-labs/hicortex.

Version 0.4 — Multi-Client Support

March 2026

• Connect multiple clients to one shared memory server.
• Split LLM config (scoring / distillation / reflection).
• New hicortex_update and hicortex_delete tools.

Version 0.3 — Claude Code Support

March 2026

• Same package works with Claude Code and OpenClaw.
• One-command install, persistent MCP server, automatic daemon.
• Nightly pipeline: capture → distill → consolidate → inject.

Version 0.2 — OpenClaw Plugin

February 2026

• Initial release as an OpenClaw lifecycle plugin.
• Semantic search (BM25 + vector + RRF), knowledge graph, decay/strengthening.
• Multi-provider LLM support.