fable Recall — verbatim session memory: every Claude Code session, indexed byte-for-byte, searchable in milliseconds

# fable Recall ## Your Claude already has a memory. fable unlocks it. [**Quickstart**](#fable-is-the-memory) · [**Why fable**](#why-fable--and-not-the-alternatives) · [**Benchmarks**](#how-it-works) · [**Roadmap**](ROADMAP.md) · [**Discussions**](../../discussions) ![MIT](https://img.shields.io/badge/license-MIT-ffb454?style=flat-square) ![stdlib only](https://img.shields.io/badge/dependencies-zero-7dd87d?style=flat-square) ![tests](https://img.shields.io/badge/tests-160%20passing-7dd87d?style=flat-square) ![local first](https://img.shields.io/badge/your%20data-never%20leaves%20your%20machine-6cc7d9?style=flat-square)

Every conversation you've ever had with Claude Code is already saved on your machine — every decision, every debugging hunt, every 2 AM breakthrough, word for word. **Claude just isn't allowed to use it.** Mid-session, compaction builds a wall: everything behind it is locked away to save tokens, and Claude carries on with a thin summary. `/clear` wipes the slate. And after 30 days, Claude Code quietly **deletes the files themselves**. Your project's real memory — locked, then destroyed, by design. Everyone else sells you a *replacement* memory: summaries, extracted facts, vector stores. fable does something different — **it unlocks the real one.** ![fable demo](demo/fable.gif) ```bash pipx install git+https://github.com/grooverLab/fable fable install # one command: register the MCP, install hooks, index your history fable serve # browse your memory in a dashboard ``` 100% local · no API keys · no cloud · no daemons. Your conversations never leave your machine.

Setup & commands

```bash pipx install git+https://github.com/grooverLab/fable # install the CLI fable install # one-shot: claude mcp add + Claude Code hooks + # ~/.fable home + index every transcript fable serve # dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:8765 pipx upgrade fable-recall # update later (pulls latest from GitHub) ``` `fable install` is idempotent — safe to re-run; it skips anything already wired. To do it by hand: `fable setup` (home) · `claude mcp add fable -- fable mcp` (MCP) · `fable discover` (index). | command | what it does | |---|---| | `fable search ` | rank threads by relevance (`--project`, `--kind`, `-n`) | | `fable context ` | assemble a budgeted context pack | | `fable thread ` | a thread's raw turns, byte-identical | | `fable file ` | a file's full edit history across sessions | | `fable cards run` | generate AI summary cards (background) | | `fable discover` | (re)scan + index all Claude Code projects | | `fable prune` · `fable export` · `fable stats` | slim a session · export · index stats | | `fable serve` | the dashboard |

- **Ask about past conversations with Claude — get the real answer.** *"What did we decide about auth last month?"* Claude searches its own history mid-session (via MCP) and quotes the **actual transcript** — not a summary, not an extracted "fact." The conversation itself. - **The wall stops costing you.** fable catalogs everything before compaction walls it off, and hands back exactly what Claude lost — on demand, under a token budget you set. - **The 30-day deletion becomes irrelevant.** Sealed into a local vault, byte-identical, for as long as you decide. ## First of its kind — five things no other tool does 🧵 **Composed Sessions.** Hand-pick conversations from *any* project, any month — put them in *your* order — and fable builds a brand-new session that Claude resumes as its own lived history. A workspace with curated memory. *(Empirically verified: restitched sessions resume cleanly, signatures intact.)* 🕰️ **File time-travel.** Your transcripts accidentally versioned everything. fable reconstructs **every file's edit history** — every Edit and Write Claude ever made, across every session — with side-by-side comparison between any two moments of a file's life, and a jump back to the conversation that made each change. (`fable file src/loader.py`) ✂️ **Transcript Surgery.** Your 80 MB session is paying rent on dead threads. Remove whole conversations — fable re-stitches the timeline, shows you the simulation first, and keeps every removed byte recallable forever. Reversible by construction. 🪶 **Pruning that loses nothing.** Slim every message (tool noise, images, bloat) before resuming a heavy session — with an itemized preview of the savings, and the original sealed in the vault first. 🔍 **Memory Diff.** See exactly what any prune or cleanup cost any conversation — generation by generation, byte by byte. Nobody else can even show you what was lost. 🔇 **Run cold.** Mute recall for a session or a fleet of sub-agents and they work with no prior context at all - no injected memory, no recall tools - while capture keeps running, so the muted work is still recorded verbatim and searchable the moment you lift it. The point is an unbiased second opinion: an audit that cannot be anchored to yesterday's conclusion. (`fable mute on` · `FABLE_MUTE=1 claude` · a toggle in Settings) ## How it works (the short version) fable indexes your transcripts into a local SQLite archive: an immutable **vault** (every byte, forever) plus a **search map** (keyword + semantic, optional local embeddings via Ollama). Hooks run before Claude Code's compaction and cleanup; an MCP server gives Claude search / recall / remember tools. Measured on a real archive — 191,000 records, 6,000 conversations: | recall@1 | recall@5 | search (p50) | full re-index | |:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:| | 76.7% | 90.0% | 135 ms | 6.6 s | Reproduce it: `python3 scripts/benchmark.py`. No competitor publishes retrieval numbers. ## Why fable — and not another memory layer | | **fable** | claude-mem | mem0 / Letta | native Claude Code | |---|:---:|:---:|:---:|:---:| | Memory = your **actual conversations** | ✅ | ❌ summaries | ❌ fact snippets | ⚠️ locked behind the wall | | Survives the 30-day deletion & `/clear` | ✅ | ⚠️ its summaries do | ❌ | ❌ | | Claude searches its own history (MCP) | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | | Composed sessions / file time-travel / surgery / diff | ✅ first of its kind | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | | Zero API keys, fully offline | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ✅ | | Footprint | one SQLite file | Node + Chroma daemon | cloud / Docker | — | (Fair is fair: mem0 fits multi-LLM production agents; ccusage goes deeper on billing analytics. Different jobs, both compatible with fable.) ## Trusted the hard way fable's first user is the session that built it: mid-build, that session was pruned by fable (7.8 MB → 3.0 MB), kept working through compaction via its own hook, and is now searchable through its own MCP server — and `fable file fable/recall.py` replays its own source code being written, 18 versions deep. The build history eats its own dogfood — all $83k of API-equivalent work in the author's archive included. **What people use it for** - *"Why did we choose X?"* — architecture archaeology, weeks later - *"When did this function break?"* — file time-travel to the exact edit and the conversation around it - Picking up a debugging hunt exactly where the wall cut it off - A composed "workspace" session: threads from three projects, one memory - Slimming a heavy session before `--resume`, reversibly - `fable remember "we deploy Fridays only"` — standing rules, every session Try it on a fictional sample first: `python3 demo/seed_demo.py && fable --db demo/demo.db serve` --- MIT · local-first forever ([non-goals](ROADMAP.md)) · built with Claude Code, for Claude Code · `@claude` answers issues here — [the butler is Claude](https://github.com/grooverLab/fable/issues/1) · [architecture deep-dive](docs/ARCHITECTURE.md) · [![Star History Chart](https://api.star-history.com/svg?repos=grooverLab/fable&type=Date)](https://star-history.com/#grooverLab/fable)