honcho

Honcho is memory infrastructure for building stateful agents that understand changing people, agents, groups, projects, and ideas over time.

Store messages and events, let Honcho reason in the background, then query peer representations, session context, search results, or natural-language insights from any model or framework. Use it managed at api.honcho.dev, run a local stack with honcho start, or self-host the FastAPI server yourself.

Using Honcho as your memory system will earn your agents higher retention, more trust, and help you build data moats to out-compete incumbents.

Honcho has defined the Pareto Frontier of Agent Memory. Watch the video, check out our evals page, and read the blog post for more detail.

Contents

• Start Here
• Why Honcho
• The Honcho Loop
• Quickstart
• What Honcho Gives You
• Integrations
• CLI
• Core Concepts
• Benchmarks & Evals
• Self-hosting
• Configuration
• Architecture
• SDKs
• Learn More
• Contributing
• License

The Honcho project is split between several repositories, with this one hosting the core service logic — implemented as a FastAPI server. Client SDKs for Python and TypeScript live in the sdks/ directory. The honcho-cli package lives here too.

Start Here

Why Honcho

The Honcho Loop

1. Store conversations, events, documents, or tool traces as messages on a session.
2. Reason — Honcho processes the queue in the background and updates peer representations.
3. Query — ask Honcho for context, search results, peer representations, or a natural-language answer.
4. Inject — drop the result into any LLM call or agent framework.

Concretely: workspaces hold peers, peers participate in sessions, messages live on sessions, and Honcho builds a per-peer representation that you query through the Chat Endpoint or directly.

Quickstart

Get an API key at app.honcho.dev — when you sign up you'll be prompted to join an organization, which gets its own dedicated Honcho instance. Or install the CLI and run honcho start --setup, then point the SDK at http://localhost:8000.

Python

pip install honcho-ai
# or: uv add honcho-ai
# or: poetry add honcho-ai

import os
from honcho import Honcho

# Managed service uses api.honcho.dev by default. For self-hosted, pass
# base_url="http://localhost:8000" or set HONCHO_URL.
honcho = Honcho(
    workspace_id="my-app-testing",
    api_key=os.environ["HONCHO_API_KEY"],
)

# 1. Store: peers and messages on a session
alice = honcho.peer("alice")
tutor = honcho.peer("tutor")
session = honcho.session("session-1")
session.add_messages([
    alice.message("Hey there — can you help me with my math homework?"),
    tutor.message("Absolutely. Send me your first problem!"),
])

# 2. Reason: happens asynchronously in the background.

# 3. Query: ask Honcho what it knows, or pull prompt-ready context.
answer = alice.chat("What learning styles does the user respond to best?")
context = session.context(summary=True, tokens=10_000)

# 4. Inject: hand the context to your model of choice.
from openai import OpenAI
client = OpenAI()
completion = client.chat.completions.create(
    model=os.environ.get("OPENAI_MODEL", "gpt-4o-mini"),
    messages=context.to_openai(assistant=tutor),
)

TypeScript

npm install @honcho-ai/sdk
# or: bun add @honcho-ai/sdk

import { Honcho } from "@honcho-ai/sdk";
import OpenAI from "openai";

const honcho = new Honcho({
  workspaceId: "my-app-testing",
  apiKey: process.env.HONCHO_API_KEY,
});

const alice = await honcho.peer("alice");
const tutor = await honcho.peer("tutor");
const session = await honcho.session("session-1");
await session.addMessages([
  alice.message("Hey there — can you help me with my math homework?"),
  tutor.message("Absolutely. Send me your first problem!"),
]);

const answer = await alice.chat(
  "What learning styles does the user respond to best?",
);
const context = await session.context({ summary: true, tokens: 10_000 });

const openai = new OpenAI();
const completion = await openai.chat.completions.create({
  model: process.env.OPENAI_MODEL ?? "gpt-4o-mini",
  messages: context.toOpenAI({ assistant: tutor }),
});

Note: background reasoning is asynchronous. Newly-added messages may take a moment to be reflected in chat/representation responses; for low-latency reads, use the representation endpoint.

What Honcho Gives You

See the full SDK Reference and API Reference.

Integrations

Honcho ships a first-party memory plugin for every major coding agent. They all read the same ~/.honcho/config.json, so one key configures all of them — and pointing two at the same workspace gives them one shared memory.

Get a key at app.honcho.dev, then honcho init (or uv tool install honcho-cli && honcho init) writes it to ~/.honcho/config.json once for every integration. Cursor and Grok Bot are the exception: the marketplace plugin signs in with OAuth, and honcho init is optional there (in Cursor it turns on automatic capture).

Claude Code

Two ways, depending on how deep you want to go:

Plugin (richer integration — recommended for Claude Code users):

/plugin marketplace add plastic-labs/claude-honcho
/plugin install honcho@honcho

Raw MCP (works in any MCP client — Cursor, Cline, Windsurf, etc.):

claude mcp add honcho \
  --transport http \
  --url "https://mcp.honcho.dev" \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer hch-your-key-here" \
  --header "X-Honcho-User-Name: YourName"

Details: Claude Code guide · MCP guide · repo.

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