Zikkaron

Zikkaron (זיכרון) is Hebrew for "memory."

Your AI forgets you every time you close the tab. Every architecture decision you explained, every debugging rabbit hole you went down together, every "remember, we're using Postgres not SQLite" correction. Gone. You start the next session a stranger to your own tools.

Zikkaron is a persistent memory engine for Claude Code built on computational neuroscience. It remembers what you worked on, how you think, what you decided and why. Not as a dumb text dump that gets shoved into context, but as a living memory system that consolidates, forgets intelligently, and reconstructs the right context at the right time.

26 subsystems. 24 MCP tools. Runs entirely on your machine. One SQLite file.

Two minutes to never repeat yourself again

pip install zikkaron

Add to your Claude Code config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "zikkaron": {
      "command": "zikkaron"
    }
  }
}

Tell Claude how to use it. Drop this in your global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md (your home directory, not per-project):

## Memory
- On every new session, call `recall` with the current project name
- Before starting any task, call `get_project_context` for the current directory
- After completing significant work, call `remember` to store decisions and outcomes

Or just let Zikkaron handle it. On every startup, it automatically syncs ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md with the latest instructions via sync_instructions. You set it up once and never think about it again.

What this actually feels like

Monday. You spend an hour debugging a nasty auth token race condition. Claude helps you trace it to a TTL mismatch between Redis and your JWT config. You fix it. Claude stores the memory.

Thursday. A user reports intermittent logouts. You open Claude Code in the same project. Before you even describe the bug, Claude recalls the Redis TTL fix from Monday, checks if it's related, and asks whether the middleware you added is handling the edge case where Redis restarts mid-session.

That's the difference. Not "here's your conversation history." Real recall. The kind where your tools understand the shape of what you've been building, not just the words you typed last time.

Retrieval that actually works

We tested Zikkaron against LoCoMo (Maharana et al., ACL 2024), the standard benchmark for long conversation memory. 10 conversations, 1,986 questions, everything from simple factual lookups to multi-hop reasoning to adversarial trick questions designed to trip you up.

	Zikkaron	What it means
Recall@10	86.8%	The right memory shows up in the top 10 nearly 9 times out of 10
MRR	0.708	The correct answer is usually the first or second result
Single-hop MRR	0.757	Factual questions, almost always nails it on the first try
Temporal MRR	0.712	"When did X happen?" queries, strong time awareness

The thing is, there's no LLM running at query time. No API calls. No billion parameter models. Just a 22MB embedding model, a SQLite file, and a bunch of neuroscience algorithms doing the heavy lifting. Most systems that hit numbers like these need GPT-4 in the loop. Zikkaron gets there with Hopfield energy scoring, spreading activation, and a cross-encoder reranker.

BEAM: 10 million tokens of conversation, one memory system