ais MCP server

ais

Save anything under your own keys, recall it by those keys.

An index in plain text on your own disk, with apps for the phone, the browser and the terminal over it. You save anything (a link, a file, a note, a password) under one or more keys, and recall it by those keys: ais venice italy gives back what you saved under both, the way your mind does, by association. It stores only a reference, so your documents stay where you keep them; the index is a view, and your data is never touched. Not a search engine over everyone's web, and not a tagger that guesses: an index of your own things under your own words. Why that matters is below.

One engine, thin front-ends. The CLI is the contract; the web GUI (ais --serve), the Flutter mobile app and a native Win32 wrapper sit over it, and the engine depends on none of them. C, no database, no runtime to install.

A coding agent can call ais the way it calls grep, except that it recalls what you filed instead of searching for it again: one line of config, 2,900 tokens a question against 24,500, and 40 of 40 answers exact. The measurement, and how to reproduce it.

Because it is plain text, it outlives its own tools: your index survives decades of archiving, still opens in fifty years, and exports into anything, no lock-in. Keeping data readable that long is computing's unsolved digital dark age, where file formats and the apps that open them die faster than the data. Plain text, readable since the 1960s on any machine with no special program, is the oldest and safest answer.

Save a path, the ssh tunnel you always look up, a link: each under the words you would think of later. Then ask by those words. The same index on the phone: Save links, file paths and notes, recall them by tag; passwords stay encrypted (🔒).

Why

Your memory, yours to keep.

A search engine and an automatic tagger both answer with the mean: what these words mean to most people, what the model saw most often. That is the right answer when you are looking for something everyone knows, and the wrong one when you are looking for something only you saved.

Your keys are the deviation from that mean. "venice" is a week in 2023 for one person, a glass factory for another, a chapter of a thesis for a third. Nothing but you records which one it is, and no amount of training data recovers it, because averaging is precisely what removes it.

So ais does not guess and does not tag for you. It saves what you give it under the words you chose, and hands it back when you say them again. That is the whole trade: you do the small work of naming a thing once, and in exchange the index is yours rather than an average of everyone's, in plain text you control, never taking your files hostage.

See about.txt for the pitch and the memex origin, and foundation.md for the prior/compression argument behind it.

Questions

Why not SQLite, or a database? A database is the right tool for an app; this is for a person. SQLite is a binary file one program understands; ais is line-oriented plain text you can read, grep, diff, and recover by hand. You trade query power you do not need for the durability and transparency of plain text (see about.txt).

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.