Self-hosted on your own AWS. memex indexes your notes and code and lets any MCP agent (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex) search it and cite the source. No SaaS, no telemetry — your second brain stays yours.
You write a lot — notes, decisions, docs, code. Six months later you can't find any of it, and your AI assistant has no idea it exists.
memex is a personal knowledge brain you run in your own cloud. It reads your markdown notes and your code, turns them into a searchable index, and hands that search to your AI agent over the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Now your agent answers "what did I decide about X?" with your own words, cited back to the exact note — instead of guessing.
It's a second brain for you, and long-term memory for your AI.
memex returns the evidence, cited to the exact file. Your agent writes the answer. (The brain retrieves — it doesn't chat.)
- Your knowledge is private. Most "AI memory" tools upload everything to someone else's servers. memex runs entirely inside one AWS account you control — your notes never leave your cloud, and there's zero telemetry.
- One brain, every agent. It exposes a single MCP endpoint. Any MCP-compatible tool connects to it; you don't re-index your life per app.
- Search that actually finds things. It blends meaning (vector embeddings), exact words (keyword search), and relationships (an entity graph) — so the thing you only half-remember still surfaces.
- Understands your code too. It indexes your source (TypeScript, Python) and can answer "who calls this function / what does it call" from a real call graph — not just your prose.
- Surfaces notes before you ask. Hand it a conversation and it volunteers the pages most likely relevant — deterministic, no AI guessing.
- Small and boring on purpose. No orchestrator, no SaaS to depend on. It fits on one small EC2 box, and you can read the whole thing in an afternoon. Multi-source tenant isolation is built in (each source scoped, opt-in fail-closed) so one box can serve more than one person — see docs/tenancy.md.
| memex | Hosted "AI memory" | A plain RAG script | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your data stays in your cloud | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Any MCP agent, one shared index | ✅ | sometimes | ❌ |
| Vector + keyword + entity-graph | ✅ | varies | vector-only |
| Understands code (real call graph), not just notes | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Zero telemetry, no SaaS dependency | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ |
Who it's for: developers who live in Claude Code / Cursor / Codex, note-takers with a markdown vault, and anyone who refuses to put their second brain on someone else's servers.
memex indexes your content once, then answers searches on demand. When your agent asks a question, here's the round trip — note that memex hands back evidence, and the agent composes the answer:
sequenceDiagram
autonumber
actor You
participant Agent as Your AI agent
participant memex as memex (MCP)
participant DB as Postgres + pgvector
You->>Agent: "What did I decide about X?"
Agent->>memex: tools/call search { q }
memex->>DB: vector + keyword + graph query
DB-->>memex: top chunks, ranked (RRF)
memex-->>Agent: cited chunks (evidence, not an answer)
Agent-->>You: answer, grounded in your own notes
Under the hood: a small Bun + TypeScript service, Postgres
16 with pgvector, AWS Bedrock for embeddings, and a Cloudflare Tunnel for
HTTPS — so no EC2 port is ever exposed. The entire public surface is two
routes: GET /health and POST /mcp. That's the whole attack surface.
Full topology, every container, and the security model: ARCHITECTURE.md.
You'll need an AWS account, Terraform 1.6+, docker compose v2, and a domain you control (for the Cloudflare Tunnel).
git clone https://github.com/<your-org>/memex.git
cd memex
make init # interactive bootstrap: AWS account, domain, buckets -> .env + tfvars
make audit # PII / secrets gate (must pass on a clean clone)
make plan # preview the AWS resources
make apply # create themmake apply boots one EC2 host, pulls the repo, fetches secrets from AWS
Secrets Manager, and starts the two containers (memex + cloudflared). Your
brain is then live at https://brain.<your-domain>/mcp.
Connecting Claude Code (or any MCP client): deploy/memex/docs/CLAUDE-CODE.md.
| Piece | What it does |
|---|---|
| memex | The brain: hybrid search, entity + code call graph, code/markdown indexers, MCP server, a built-in advisor that ranks what to fix, push-context that volunteers relevant pages, an opt-in (off-by-default) step that distils notes into concepts/opinions in a separate store (your original notes are never touched) with a take-review lifecycle (list_takes / takes_search / set_take_status), and a self-maintaining background cycle. 63 MCP tools. |
| cloudflared | Public HTTPS ingress via Cloudflare Tunnel — no open EC2 ports. |
| Terraform | All AWS infra (VPC, EC2, RDS, EFS, Secrets Manager) as one module. |
| AWS Bedrock | Titan v2 embeddings + Claude Haiku for query intent and the optional, off-by-default note synthesis (Claude Sonnet for the paid opt-in deep-reasoning slices). Your agent still writes the answers. |
Learn more: How it works · ARCHITECTURE.md · Deployment · Configuration · Tenancy · API / MCP tools · Operations · Privacy · Changelog
If a private, self-hosted brain for your AI agent is something you want to exist, give it a ⭐ — it's the signal that keeps this maintained. Bugs and ideas welcome in issues.
memex is intentionally small — one box, multi-source tenant isolation, no SaaS — so open an issue before anything that adds infrastructure or changes the deploy story. Please read CLAUDE.md (the repo's working rules) first.
Found a vulnerability? Please don't open a public issue — see SECURITY.md for the private disclosure channel.
MIT. Fork it, redeploy it, modify it, ship it. Solo-maintained, no SLA — if you need guarantees, fork and pin.