recall

recall

A self-improving layer for Claude Code: it learns from your sessions, retains knowledge in a vault, and proposes skills/automations from recurring patterns.

This repo holds the machinery (hooks, distill prompt + runner, dashboard, install config). The knowledge lives in a separate vault directory, partitioned by project — kept out of this repo entirely.

capture (Stop hook) ──▶ vault/sessions ──▶ distill (nightly) ──▶ vault/knowledge
                                                       │
        retrieve (SessionStart hook) ◀────────────────┘
                                                       └──▶ inbox/proposals.md ──▶ you approve ──▶ skills

How it works

1. Capture — hooks/capture-session.sh, wired to Claude Code's Stop hook. On each session end it writes a raw dump (cwd, project, git diff stat, transcript pointer) to the vault. Pure shell + jq, ~zero tokens, never blocks.
2. Distill — distill/run-distill.sh, a nightly launchd job. Thins each new transcript, runs a headless Claude pass to update knowledge/, refreshes the indexes, and appends pattern observations to inbox/proposals.md. Skips (costs $0) when there's nothing new.
3. Retrieve — hooks/inject-knowledge.sh, wired to the SessionStart hook. Injects the global + per-project knowledge indexes as background context so they survive /clear and auto-compact.
4. Gate — distill only proposes into inbox/proposals.md. Nothing auto-promotes to a skill until you approve it.
5. Dashboard — dashboard/recall.sh (status CLI) and build-dashboard.sh (self-contained HTML). recall.sh open rebuilds and opens it.

Prerequisites

• macOS (the scheduler uses launchd; the scripts assume BSD date/stat).
• Claude Code — the claude CLI on your PATH.
• Homebrew bash 4+ — brew install bash (system /bin/bash is 3.2 and lacks mapfile).
• jq, git, perl — jq via brew install jq; git/perl ship with macOS.

Install

Clone the repo anywhere you like — ~/Sites/recall below is just an example; ~/dev/recall, ~/code/recall, etc. are all fine. The installer locates itself, so the repo path is never hardcoded.

git clone <this-repo> ~/Sites/recall   # or wherever you prefer
cd ~/Sites/recall
./install/install.sh                    # interactive

The installer is interactive and will ask:

• where the vault lives — point it at an existing Obsidian vault (recall lives in a recall/ subfolder, syncing alongside your notes) or let it create one;
• whether to init git — only if the chosen directory isn't already a repo, and it offers to skip if you manage git via the obsidian-git plugin instead;
• what time distill runs — defaults to 19:00 (7pm);
• whether to add a recall block to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md — a short, idempotent note telling Claude the vault is auto-injected and read-only in sessions.

It then checks dependencies, scaffolds the vault, merges the two hooks into ~/.claude/settings.json without disturbing existing hooks (backup written to settings.json.recall-bak), and loads the launchd job. Safe to re-run.

Non-interactive / scripted installs:

./install/install.sh -y                 # accept all defaults, no prompts
./install/install.sh --vault ~/notes/recall --time 22:30
./install/install.sh --no-git --no-launchd

Flag	Effect
-y, --yes	No prompts; accept defaults.
--vault DIR	Set the recall data dir explicitly (skips the vault question).
--time HH:MM	Nightly distill time, 24h.
--no-git	Never git init the vault.
--no-launchd	Skip the scheduler (run distill by hand).
--no-claude-md	Don't add the recall block to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md.

For knowledge to sync across machines the vault needs a git origin remote (the nightly job commits + pushes) — or let the obsidian-git plugin handle sync. Without either, distilled knowledge is still saved locally.

Configuration

All optional — sensible defaults apply.

Variable	Default	What
RECALL_VAULT	~/Documents/Vault/recall	Vault data dir (sessions, knowledge, inbox).
RECALL_DISTILL_THRESHOLD	1	Min undistilled sessions before a nightly run does work.
RECALL_DISTILL_MODEL	sonnet	Model for the distill pass.
RECALL_DISTILL_BUDGET	1.50	Max USD per distill run.
RECALL_DISTILL_STALE_MIN	30	Skip sessions touched within this many minutes (still active).
RECALL_INJECT_MAX_LINES	200	Cap on lines of knowledge injected per session (mirrors Claude Code memory).
RECALL_INJECT_MAX_BYTES	25600	Cap on bytes injected per session; overflow is truncated with a visible marker.

The installer bakes RECALL_VAULT into the launchd plist, so a custom --vault is respected by the nightly job. For the hooks/CLI to use a custom vault in your interactive shell, export RECALL_VAULT in your shell profile.

Usage

dashboard/recall.sh            # overall health (default)
dashboard/recall.sh sessions   # per-project session breakdown
dashboard/recall.sh knowledge  # notes by area + recent additions
dashboard/recall.sh proposals  # pending + implemented proposals
dashboard/recall.sh distill    # recent runs (cost, duration, outcome)
dashboard/recall.sh open       # rebuild + open the HTML dashboard
dashboard/recall.sh update     # self-update (git pull + re-apply install)
dashboard/recall.sh all        # everything

distill/run-distill.sh         # run a distill pass now (instead of waiting for 7pm)

Updating

recall runs in place from the clone, so updating is just pulling the latest code and re-applying the install (to pick up any changed hook/launchd templates):

dashboard/recall.sh update

This does git pull --ff-only then re-runs install.sh non-interactively using the settings saved at install time (<vault>/.recall-install). The installed version is shown by recall.sh status and in the dashboard footer; when your clone is behind its remote, both surface an "update available" hint (the nightly distill refreshes that check).

Vault layout

<RECALL_VAULT>/                 default: ~/Documents/Vault/recall
  sessions/                     raw dumps, tagged by project
  knowledge/
    global/        <topic>.md   cross-project
    projects/<proj>/<topic>.md  project-specific
  inbox/proposals.md            skill/automation candidates (you approve)
  dashboard.html                generated dashboard

Scoping: global + per-project

Knowledge and skills land at the narrowest scope that fits, and promote to global only when a pattern generalizes.

• Pattern in one project → project-local skill (<proj>/.claude/skills/)
• Pattern across ≥2 projects → global skill (~/.claude/skills/)

Design decisions (locked)

Decision	Choice	Why
Knowledge store	Hybrid	Tiny always-on index → on-demand vault reads. Flat per-session token cost as knowledge grows.
Capture	Auto Stop hook, raw dump	Pure shell, no LLM call (~zero tokens), never forgets. Summarizing deferred to distill.
Automation gate	Human-approval	Distill only proposes into an inbox. Nothing auto-promotes until trusted.
Project identity	git repo root, else launch dir	Subdirs of one repo = same project; loose folders scoped to launch dir.

Uninstall

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.recall.distill.plist
rm ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.recall.distill.plist
# then remove the two recall entries from ~/.claude/settings.json
# (restore ~/.claude/settings.json.recall-bak if you want the pre-install state)

The vault is never touched by uninstall — delete ~/Documents/Vault/recall yourself if you want the captured data gone.

Inspiration

recall was inspired by Andrej Karpathy's LLM Wiki: the idea that instead of re-deriving answers from raw sources every time, an LLM should incrementally maintain a persistent, compounding markdown knowledge base — cross-referenced notes that build up over time, with the tedious bookkeeping left to the model.

recall applies that loop to Claude Code, with the same three layers Karpathy describes — raw sources → wiki → schema:

• raw sources → captured session dumps (sessions/)
• the wiki → the distilled, cross-linked ([[...]]) knowledge vault (knowledge/)
• the schema → the distill prompt + indexes that govern how the wiki is maintained

The nightly distill pass is what does the bookkeeping: reading the day's raw sessions and folding them into the wiki so each new session starts from accumulated knowledge rather than cold.