A long-running personal agent with durable structured memory on disk, hybrid retrieval into each turn, and plain-file ownership. Shape of the system — not a build guide.
Live thread. When it nears the model limit, older turns are summarised, recent turns stay hot, the full transcript is retained on disk as append-only JSONL, and before compaction the agent is prompted to flush durable notes.
Plain Markdown files on disk, owned by the user — a curated profile, dated daily notes, insight logs, working state.
Hybrid semantic plus keyword search over that store. Only the relevant excerpts load per turn.
Compaction. Session resets. Restarts. Model swaps.
Everything in the durable layer persists through all of it. The session layer is working RAM. The disk is the long-term store.
A new session does not start from zero if the Markdown is intact. A model change does not erase the profile, the daily notes, the insight log, or the working state. Transcripts remain on disk as the audit trail of what was said and what tools ran.
Nothing lives in a proprietary vault. Export is plain files: profile, daily notes, insight logs, full transcripts with tool calls, working state.
Copy the folder tree. Zip it. Put it under git. Migrate the machine. The store moves with the files.
Real numbers from a running install — not estimates, not a pitch deck ceiling.
Architecture is the claim. These are the receipts — redacted excerpts from a live insight log and profile store.
“Not being able to FIND a file is a direct trigger for a spiral… Findability isn’t a nicety — it’s spiral-prevention.”
“The true end-goal is TIME, not money… ‘What I actually want is my time. I want to live in this world and experience my children and experience the breeze.’ Decisions frame around freeing time, not maximising revenue.”
Human-facing deliverables land in iCloud inboxes — never left in agent workspace directories. Workspace is operator storage; the owner looks in iCloud. Plain text path, right folder, done.
That is continuity you can inspect. Not a claim that “it remembers you.” Actual lines, on disk, still true months later.
This is durable structured memory, not infinite verbatim recall of every joke from month four. Compaction summarises the cold session tail. Retrieval surfaces relevant excerpts, not the entire archive, into each turn. That is the trade that keeps the system useful instead of bloated. A real builder admits it. A gimmick does not.
$20 founding entry while the first hundred fill. Memory locked to you. Fuel separate.
Get Murphy — $20