prism-coder

Prism Coder

Give your AI agent memory that lasts — and see the cloud tokens it never had to spend. Persistent sessions, knowledge graphs, offline tool-routing, and an auditable savings meter. Fully local and free.

Prism Coder is an MCP server that gives Claude, Cursor, and other AI tools long-term memory that survives across sessions. It ships with the open-weight prism-coder model fleet (2B–27B) for fast, offline tool-routing — no cloud required. And it keeps score: every call served locally is metered, so prism savings shows the token volume that never reached your cloud model — measured honestly, in tokens.

No account needed. No API keys. Runs on your machine.
A paid subscription adds cloud sync, higher model tiers, and team features through the Synalux portal.

---

What Prism gives you

• Session memory that survives restarts — resume projects with handoff notes, recent work, open TODOs, and configurable quick, standard, or deep context.
• Local-first inference — bounded work is routed through local Ollama models first, with automatic 2B/4B/9B/27B selection based on installed models, available RAM, context fit, and subscription entitlements.
• A savings meter you can audit — prism savings (or the local_savings tool from any host) reports the token volume local serving kept off your cloud model: headline, local share, per-model breakdown. It reports tokens, never an invented dollar figure, and prints its assumptions and known undercounts inline — a number you can check, not marketing.
• Route-output enforcement — route mode returns only well-formed calls to tools the host actually advertised. Standard and higher plans can add authenticated deterministic correction; route_guard: "local" disables that correction only. cloud_fallback: false forbids cloud inference fallback and verify: false (with no evidence) disables the grounding verifier. With all three off, no request carries your prompt, draft or evidence; the per-call entitlement check and telemetry still contact the portal and carry neither.
• One setup for every agent — prism connect configures Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Gemini CLI, and Codex while preserving unrelated settings.
• Subscription-aware skills — entitled skills are synchronized before the host launches, with safe upgrades, downgrades, conflict preservation, and offline last-good recovery.
• Hook-free startup — MCP metadata and native instructions request Prism's startup context without requiring lifecycle hooks or a Prism-owned launcher. Where a host offers hooks (Claude Code, Codex), prism connect adds two small ones on top: mid-session prompt routing, and a post-compaction re-injection of the protected-floor digest.
• Safe escalation and observability — inference outcomes are explicit, reserved text remains fail-closed (clinical images are processed locally, never sent to the cloud), and local/cloud usage is recorded for review.

Get started

npm install -g prism-mcp-server
prism connect
prism dashboard

Use prism connect --dry-run to preview changes, prism connect --all to configure every detected host, or prism connect --refresh to reconcile Prism-managed entries after an upgrade. Restart the host after connecting.

prism dashboard opens the current local Mind Palace without a Synalux login. Prism works locally without an account, API key, or cloud subscription. Add a Synalux subscription when you want cloud memory, paid-tier skills, or team features.

To check your plan, open ⚙ Account & Settings → Account in the dashboard. Free users see Start 14-day trial; paid users see Manage subscription. During a trial, the same panel shows the paid tier and exact end date. No card is required to start. Add payment details before the end date to continue; if you do not, the subscription cancels and local Prism Free remains available. You can also compare plans directly at synalux.ai/pricing#prism-plans.

After a few sessions, ask what it's been worth:

prism savings --period month

💾 Local serving — LAST 30 DAYS
  ~510K tokens kept off your cloud model
  53 call(s) served locally of 58 routed (91%)

Your numbers will differ — that's the point: it reports what your machine actually served, not a projection. Full report anatomy and the honesty rules behind it are in the local_savings section.

Install as a plugin

Prism also ships as a plugin, which registers the MCP server and the startup skill for you.

Both hosts install straight from this repository. There is nothing to host and no server to run: the catalogue is the .claude-plugin/marketplace.json file committed here, and your client clones it from GitHub.

Claude Code:

claude plugin marketplace add dcostenco/prism-coder
claude plugin install prism-coder@prism

Codex:

codex plugin marketplace add dcostenco/prism-coder
codex plugin add prism-coder@prism

The plugin registers prism-mcp via npx -y prism-mcp-server. If you already configured Prism by hand — prism connect writes an mcp_servers.prism-mcp entry — you have that server twice under one key. Install the plugin or run prism connect, not both.

What prism connect changes about host subagents

connect steers bounded work to prism_infer on your machine rather than to host-spawned agents. What it writes differs per host, and it does not disable subagents everywhere — Claude Code keeps them and is pointed at an economy model instead. Prism's local workers stay available over MCP in every case.

Host	Setting written	Effect
Claude Code	env.CLAUDE_CODE_SUBAGENT_MODEL = "sonnet" in ~/.claude/settings.json	Subagents stay enabled, pinned to an economy model. Fan-out is discouraged by policy text, not by config
Gemini CLI	experimental.enableAgents = false in ~/.gemini/settings.json	Subagents off. Gemini exposes one boolean, so that is all there is to set
Codex	features.multi_agent = false in $CODEX_HOME/config.toml (default ~/.codex), plus a bounded fallback: 2 threads, depth 1, cheap subagent model, 900s cap	Subagents off, with a bounded profile underneath so a deliberate re-enable lands somewhere sane

Two things worth knowing:

• experimental is Gemini's namespace, not ours. Prism is not enabling anything experimental — it writes false to a flag Gemini already defines at that path. Writing anywhere else would have no effect.
• That namespace is by definition temporary. If Gemini promotes enableAgents out of experimental, Prism keeps writing the old path, Gemini reads the new one, and host subagents quietly turn back on. Nothing errors and the settings file still looks correct. If you see host subagents running while enableAgents reads false, check whether the key has moved before assuming connect failed to write it.

Both writes are idempotent in the sense that a host already configured this way is left untouched — but they are re-applied on every prism connect run, not only on --refresh. If you deliberately re-enable host subagents, the next connect will turn them off again. Keep them on by not re-running connect, or by re-enabling after each run.

---

What's New in v20.21.15

Follow-ups: see what runs locally, and a stricter screen when the classifier is down

• local_savings (and prism savings) shows a line for follow-ups, calls that carried your conversation. It covers how many the local model answered (and how many of those the 9b answered), how many the on-device screen refused and at which stage, how many your plan's multi-turn limits refused, and how many went to the cloud.
• A short chat answer ("16", "Yes") counts as an answer. Before, the quality gate treated it as empty, and a paid plan re-asked the cloud.
• When the on-device classifier fails every read on a follow-up, the follow-up is no longer answered on a keyword check alone. It goes to the cloud if your plan allows it, and is refused otherwise.

What's New in v20.21.14

Skills load when they help, and you can see why they loaded

• Background task notifications, reports from other agents and continuation summaries no longer load skills in the middle of a task, so a word inside an agent's report cannot pull in unrelated rules.
• Pasting Prism's startup output into a prompt no longer loads skills that happen to share a word with it.
• Tasks that say they need host tools or reserved judgment stay with the host instead of failing on the local worker.
• Every routed-skills header ends with the routing table version (for example "Routing table v41."), so a past skill load can be checked against the exact rules that chose it.
• Skills with their own triggers now load even when their file uses Windows line endings or mentions prompt_triggers: in its description; before, they were delivered but silently never loaded.

What's New in v20.21.13

Paid plans and trials are clear in Account & Settings

• Free users can open the Prism plan comparison and start a 14-day trial.
• Trial users see their paid tier, exact end date, and the action to add payment details before automatic cancellation.
• Active and payment-recovery states lead to the correct hosted billing action; an unavailable verification is labeled instead of being presented as paid.
• Local Prism Free remains available without an account or subscription.

What's New in v20.21.12

Multiple MCP hosts keep a working dashboard link

• Each running Prism host now registers its local dashboard independently.
• prism dashboard and the startup message verify the newest candidates and fall back to an older live dashboard when a newer host stops.
• Instance cleanup cannot remove another host's registration, and the open message preserves the linked account and plan description.

What's New in v20.21.11

Linked accounts persist across dashboard refreshes

• A host process with an obsolete launch credential now recovers from the newer account saved by the dashboard after the obsolete credential is rejected.
• Valid host credentials remain authoritative; sign-out, concurrent account changes, network failures, and server failures do not trigger an unsafe credential switch.
• prism dashboard opens the active local dashboard without relabeling a linked Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise account as Free.

What's New in v20.21.10

Signed-out Free dashboards keep working locally

• Signing out now switches Project View, project details, and graph reads to local SQLite without requiring an account, configuration edit, or restart.
• The saved Synalux backend preference remains ready for the next sign-in; accidental missing cloud credentials still fail closed.
• Latest Activity uses the newest durable session when it is newer than the