deja-vu

Install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/main/install.sh | sh
deja install --auto

Ten seconds to install, about ten to index, and it is useful. The second command wires MCP recall into every agent it finds, turns on session-start recall where the agent supports it, and builds the first index so the next session does not pay for it.

Start a new agent session and ask it something you worked on months ago:

have we dealt with jwt refresh rotation before? check your memory

It does not have to be asked, either — with auto-recall the agent already knows what you solved in that project when the session opens.

brew install deja-vu, go install github.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/cmd/deja@latest, or npx @vshulcz/deja-vu "query" to try it without installing anything. Desktop apps that take MCP servers as bundles can open the .mcpb from the latest release; it carries the binary.

Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Qwen, OpenClaw and Copilot can take the same plugin bundle from their own marketplaces instead:

claude plugin marketplace add vshulcz/deja-vu && claude plugin install deja-vu@deja-vu

On Windows the install script exits with unsupported OS — it is a shell script. Use Scoop instead, from the main bucket every Scoop install already has:

scoop install deja-vu

Or take deja-vu_<version>_windows_amd64.zip from the latest release and put deja.exe on your PATH, e.g. in %USERPROFILE%\.local\bin.

The binary alone is a complete install for searching: index, search, show, ctx, blame, --json and redaction need nothing else. deja install is what wires MCP into your agents and turns on session-start recall — worth having, and optional. On a binary-only setup deja doctor reports every MCP target as not-wired, which is that setup working as intended. deja warmup also leaves a skill at ~/.agents/skills/deja-search/SKILL.md that teaches an agent the CLI contract — deja search --json, ctx, blame, how to read tier and total — so it knows history is searchable without MCP. The copy in the repo is skills/deja-search/SKILL.md.

deja install --all is --auto without the session-start recall: agents answer from memory when they decide to call it, rather than starting each session with it. The agent setup guide covers what each harness supports, aider's read-only context file, and the Windows cmd /c deja mcp wrapper.

Install also writes user-level guidance for the harnesses it detects: Claude Code, Codex, opencode, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, Qwen, Kimi Code, pi, Senpi, Copilot, VS Code Copilot Chat, Cursor, Goose, OpenClaw, Hermes, Roo Code, omp, Amp, prime-agent, DeepSeek Harness, Continue, Crush and Zed each get it in their own guidance file (or under the configured XDG_CONFIG_HOME). Re-run rewrites deja's skill or marked block without changing surrounding user content. Use deja install --all --no-guidance to opt out; Grok Build gets the shared skill in ~/.agents/skills, which is what it reads; the ~/.grok/GROK.md written beside it is for the unrelated community CLI that shares that directory. Cursor has no user-level instructions file, so it gets the shared skill in ~/.agents/skills — one of the four places Cursor reads skills from — read only when something looks relevant rather than every session.

What you get

Solve it in Codex. Claude remembers. Thirty-three coding agents write every conversation to local files, and deja turns those files into one memory layer all of them read.

Retroactive search	deja "connection pool exhausted" over gigabytes, including everything from before you installed deja. Natural-language questions fall back to a relevance tier. Time is a hint, not a filter.
Cross-agent recall	The MCP recall tool answers "we fixed this three weeks ago" in whichever agent asks, whoever solved it originally.
It survives compaction	Measured over 43 compactions: the summary keeps 77% of the decisions and 0.2% of the commands you ran. deja hands back the other 99.8% — and on Claude Code and Codex it captures the task, the files and the commands as the compaction starts, then returns them once in the next session.
Recall at the point of action	Before an agent edits a file or runs a command, deja names that file's prior decision, that command's working invocation, or the program this machine does not have. When a command fails, a PostToolUse hook answers with what followed that same error here before — the pair an agent never thinks to ask for.
It indexes the work, not just the talk	The files each turn opened, the commands that ran with their exit status, and the exact spans an edit replaced. That is the part every summary throws away.

It knows what held	deja promote <id> --state rejected --note "why" marks a decision you reverted. Every later hit for that session shows it was tried and rejected, with the reason. Nothing is deleted, and --state accepted takes the mark back.
It says when the ground moved	A hit reports 4 files this session touched have changed since, and says nothing when it cannot tell. It never claims anything is unchanged.
Sync and handoff	deja sync ssh laptop moves memory between machines, append-only, no cloud in the middle. deja handoff --to codex packages the live context so you can continue in another agent.
Redaction	Keys, tokens, JWTs and private key blocks are stripped at index time, so the cache is safe to keep.

Your own work, wrapped

deja stats --card draws it in the terminal; give it a filename and it writes an SVG for a profile README. To post it anywhere else, turn it into a PNG — that page converts it in your own browser.

The full feature reference lives in the docs.

Privacy

Indexing and search are local. The network is used only by deja update, deja sync ssh, and the version check in deja doctor.

Credentials are redacted at index time: AWS keys, api_key= and token= assignments, bearer tokens and raw JWTs, PEM private key blocks, provider tokens, scheme://user:pass@host URLs, high-entropy values for shapes no pattern knows, and a password stated in prose — "the admin password is …", where there is no delimiter for the other rules to find. The value becomes [redacted:<kind>] and the surrounding text stays searchable. deja share and deja sync export re-apply redaction on the way out.

deja forget removes sessions from a rebuilt index and writes tombstones, so a later deja index cannot restore them from the source history. --unforget lifts a tombstone. Project exclusions are one pattern per line in ~/.config/deja/exclude; a line prefixed harness: names a store instead — harness:opencode — and deja neither walks it nor asks for the tool that would read it.

The security model documents data flows, redaction limits, trust assumptions and release verification.

CLI

$ deja "jwt refresh token"
[claude] api        · Jul 8 · 8f31c0a9 — 2 matches
  login started failing after refresh token rotation; jwt kid mismatch in tests
  fixed by reloading jwks cache after rotateKey and adding a clock-skew test
[codex]  web        · Jul 1 · b77d91e2 — 1 match
  refresh token cookie needed SameSite=Lax in local callback flow

Ask your history

Command	What it does
deja <query>	Search every history. Multi-word is AND and quoted phrases require contiguous text; a query with no exact match then tries word forms and close spellings, which is where a substring reaches its word (code finds opencode).
deja	With an index and a terminal: today's sessions, recalls served, a question you asked in more than one session, and a wall your agents keep hitting.
deja wip	What the last session in this directory was doing: the task, what it settled, the files in flight, the last command and whether it failed — derived from the transcript, not from a note someone remembered to write.
deja blame <path>[:line]	Which sessions discussed a file, what was decided, and why. With a line: the commit that last changed it, and the session that wrote the text that commit replaced.
deja files <topic>	The other direction: which files the work on a subject actually touched.