Hindsight Coding-Agent Memory

This machine runs the hindsight-coding-agents plugin: long-term project memory for coding sessions, backed by a Hindsight server. You (the agent) are already wired into it — this skill explains what happens automatically, which tools you have, and how to configure or debug it.

What happens automatically (no action needed)

• Per-repo memory bank: each repository resolves to a bank (shown in the session banner: ↳ memory bank “coding-agent::<repo>”). Worktrees share the main repo's bank.
• Ingestion builds itself: on first open, the bank is seeded from recent commit messages and a read-only codebase survey; every session start, a background engine tops it up (new commits, new conversations) and keeps 5 knowledge pages current. There is NO ingest command to run.
• Session synthesis: by default, the first prompt of a session triggers one deep memory synthesis (reflect) injected into context. autoInject switches the source: pages (knowledge page search hits), recall (recalled observations), or none (nothing injected; the agent searches the knowledge pages first and reflects only when they are too shallow).
• Write-back: the session transcript is retained into the bank automatically at session end (per-turn on opencode). The user never needs to "save" a conversation.

Storing things deliberately

When the user says "store this in hindsight" / "remember this":

• The current conversation is captured automatically at session end — say so; no tool needed.
• An external document, notes, or durable findings → hindsight_ingest_document(title, content).
• A new feature/initiative being started → hindsight_capture_initiative(title, summary), right after the plan is agreed and before code is written.
• A plan that materially changed (goal, scope, or rationale — including mid-implementation) → call hindsight_capture_initiative again with relates_to_page_id set to that initiative's page id, summarising the current intent. Same page, updated plan — never a second page. Trivial course-corrections don't count.

Retrieving

• hindsight_search_knowledge_pages(query) — FIRST STOP for project questions (components, conventions, past decisions, initiatives). Server-side hybrid search, fast.
• hindsight_read_knowledge_page(page_id) / hindsight_list_knowledge_pages — read pages fully.
• hindsight_reflect(query) — deep reasoning over the whole memory for WHY questions and exact decided values; slower (seconds), use deliberately.
• Credit visibly whenever memory informs an answer: start that part with 🧠 From Hindsight memory (<page>): … — and never credit memory that didn't contribute.

Correcting wrong or stale memory

If you verify that something Hindsight served is wrong or outdated (the code, git, or an external source contradicts it), FIX THE RECORD — don't just ignore it. Call hindsight_ingest_document with:

• title: Correction: <topic> (e.g. Correction: retry policy 4xx set)
• content: (1) what memory claimed, (2) what is verifiably true now, (3) the evidence you checked (file/commit/output). Quote exact values verbatim.

Newer facts supersede older ones in retrieval, so one clear correction permanently outranks the stale memory. Do this whenever you catch a wrong injected memory, a stale knowledge-page claim, or an outdated decision — silent disregard leaves the trap armed for the next session.

Install / update

npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents install all          # every detected agent, wired natively
npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents install claude-code  # or just one
npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents uninstall all        # removes exactly what install added
npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents update               # refresh the runtime only, no rewiring
npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents stats                # how often each agent uses Hindsight

install takes an explicit target — all, or one or more harness names. A bare npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents install changes nothing and prints the choice, so wiring every agent on the machine is never something that happens by accident. Updating is the same install command again — it re-copies the runtime in place.

Day to day you should not have to: once a day, a session start checks npm and re-stages a newer runtime in the background (autoUpdate, on by default — set it to false to pin the version you have). That is the update command above, which refreshes the copy every wired agent already points at and deliberately touches no host config; re-run install yourself after a release that adds a new hook, or to wire another agent.

Local daemon settings (daemon mode)

Daemon settings keep the names the old per-agent Claude Code plugin used, so an existing environment carries over unchanged:

Any HINDSIGHT_API_* variable you export is forwarded to the daemon, so server-side settings need no equivalent here.

Configuration

Configuration is one JSON file: ~/.hindsight/coding-agent.json. Layering, later wins per field:

1. built-in defaults
2. environment variables — HINDSIGHT_API_URL, HINDSIGHT_API_TOKEN, and one per scalar setting (HINDSIGHT_<FIELD_IN_CAPS>), for containers and CI that inject config rather than write a file
3. the file's top level
4. its harnesses.<name> section — per-agent override
5. its banks.<resolvedBankId> section — per-repo override, applied after the bank is resolved (see Per-repo opt-in/out)

Environment variables are a fallback: the file wins wherever it sets a value, so adding env to an existing setup changes nothing. The two list-valued settings, retainTags and optInPaths, take a comma-separated value (HINDSIGHT_RETAIN_TAGS="project:{gitProject},env:work"); entries are trimmed and blanks dropped. The map-valued settings (mapPathToBank, harnesses, banks, retainMetadata) are file-only — per-key branching doesn't survive flattening into one variable. maxParallelRetains is available as HINDSIGHT_MAX_PARALLEL_RETAINS for containers and CI.

HINDSIGHT_CONFIG moves the file itself — point it at another path for a container or a test harness where $HOME is not the right anchor. It is still exactly one file; only its location changes. (The other variables that are not settings are HINDSIGHT_LOG_FILE, HINDSIGHT_DIAG_FILE, HINDSIGHT_USAGE_FILE and HINDSIGHT_LOG_LEVEL — see Diagnostics & logging.)

When a change takes effect

Config is read when a process starts — the file is not watched — so when an edit applies depends on what reads it:

apiToken is the exception. Every host re-reads it when the server rejects a request, so enabling authentication or rotating the key is picked up on the next call with nothing to restart — otherwise a rotation would leave a long-running agent failing every memory call until it was restarted. Everything else follows the table: apiUrl, disabled, bank routing, gitIngest, and the survey and knowledge-page settings.

hindsight_diagnose reports both sides of that gap — what the file says now, and what the running client is actually using.

Opt-in only

By default every project gets memory — that is what makes the plugin zero-setup. If you would rather nothing be remembered until you say so, turn memory off everywhere and name the projects that may use it:

{
  "optInOnly": true,
  "optInPaths": ["~/work/client-x", "~/oss"],
}

Anything outside those paths is inert: no bank is created, nothing is retained, no seed runs, and the agent behaves exactly as it would without the plugin. Approving costs nothing else — optInPaths says which projects, not which bank, so an approved repo keeps its usual coding-agent::{gitProject} name. Paths are prefixes, so approving ~/work approves every repo under it while each still gets its own bank.

A mapPathToBank entry counts as opted in too, since routing a path to a named bank already declares that project. A bare bankId does not: it names a bank rather than a project, so it cannot say which work may be remembered, and a privacy switch has to fail closed.

There is no per-repo opt-in file, for the same reason there is no repo-carried config at all: a cloned repository must not be able to turn memory on.

There is deliberately no repo-carried config file — per-repo bank routing is mapPathToBank, per-agent differences are harnesses.<name>.

Each entry point knows which harness it is (the opencode plugin is loaded by opencode, the codex hook by Codex...), so one shared config serves several agents side by side:

{
  "apiUrl": "https://api.hindsight.vectorize.io",
  "harnesses": {
    "opencode": { "reflectTimeoutMs": 60000 },
    "claude-code": { "disabled": true }, // e.g. memory off for Claude only
  },
}

Reference

By default a page refreshes hourly, staggered: pageTriggerCron is "H * * * *", so every page gets its own minute of the hour (see below) and a tick with nothing new to fold in is skipped server-side. That keeps pages within an hour of the repo without paying auto-refresh's price — one LLM synthesis per page per consolidation, on a repo that consolidates all day. Set pageTriggerType: "auto-refresh" to go back to refreshing on every consolidation.

pageTriggerType/pageTriggerCron decide only when a page refreshes. How it refreshes belongs to the server: Hindsight creates a knowledge page with a delta refresh (each pass edits the page instead of rebuilding it) that doesn't reflect over sibling pages, and these settings merge over those defaults rather than replacing them.

Spreading refreshes with H

One pageTriggerCron is shared by every page in every repo you point this plugin at. So a literal "0 3 * * *" does not schedule a refresh at 03:00 — it schedules all of them at 03:00, five pages per bank, on the same worker pool that serves retain. A session ingesting at 03:0x queues behind the pile, and moving the hour just moves the pile.

Write a field as H and it is replaced, per page, by a value hashed from the bank id and the page name. Each page gets its own slot, the same slot on every run:

H is Jenkins' syntax for the same problem. It never reaches the API: the plugin resolves it to an ordinary cron expression ("41 17 * * *") when it creates the page, so the schedule you see in the control plane is a plain one you can edit. Hashing spreads pages out, it does not partition them — two pages can still land on the same minute, just not all of them.

These settings apply to the pages a repo already has, too. Every session compares each page this plugin created — the seeded taxonomy and every captured initiative — against the config and re-syncs the ones that differ, so a bank seeded before this default changed moves onto the hourly schedule by itself, and a page you retriggered by hand in the control plane is put back on the configured policy the next time an agent runs. The config file is the source of truth for these pages: to give one a different schedule, change pageTriggerType/pageTriggerCron (per bank, if it is only that repo) rather than editing the page. Only the fields this plugin states are touched — a page's mode, its excluded siblings and its minimum refresh interval are left exactly as they are.

Customize Knowledge Pages — pages

Every repo gets the same five pages. They are a taxonomy, not a summary of your source: each one is synthesized from what the bank ingested — commit history and past conversations — and each is pinned to one knowledge tier, so a page draws only on the facts the extractor routed to it.

pages says which of them to seed and what each one asks. Keys are the page names above, matched ignoring case and surrounding spaces:

{
  "pages": {
    // don't seed this page at all
    "Component map": false,
    // seed it, but ask your question instead of the built-in one
    "Key decisions and rationale": {
      "source_query": "What did we decide about data retention, encryption and PII handling, and why? Prefer decisions that constrain what new code may do.",
    },
  },
}

Omit pages entirely — the default — and all five are seeded with their built-in queries.

Fewer pages. Each page costs one LLM synthesis per refresh, so a repo that only wants the architecture ones turns the rest off:

{
  "pages": {
    "Initiatives and enhancements": false,
    "Conventions and patterns": false,
    "Key decisions and rationale": false,
  },
}

Per repo, like every other field — usually where this belongs, since what a page should ask is a property of the project, not of your machine:

{
  "banks": {
    "coding-agent::payments-api": {
      "pages": {
        "Core concepts": {
          "source_query": "What are the payment domain's entities — orders, ledgers, settlement states — and what does each mean in OUR model?",
        },
      },
    },
  },
}

Four things worth knowing before you reach for it:

• This is the only durable way to reword a page. Every session compares each seeded page against the query it is configured to have and re-syncs the ones that differ, so a source_query edited through the API or the control plane is replaced the next time an agent runs. Setting it here makes your wording the configured one. When a re-sync does replace a query, the plugin now says which page in the plugin log rather than doing it silently.
• Your query still gets the scoping clause. The sentence that keeps a dependency's decisions off your project's page is appended to a custom query too — a bank holds facts about the libraries and services a repo merely uses, and without that clause a page will present them as yours.
• The tier tag stays the taxonomy's. It selects which facts the synthesis reads; rewording the question changes what is asked of those facts, not which ones are in scope.
• false does not delete anything. A page already seeded keeps its content and simply stops being re-synced — remove it in the control plane if you want it gone.

A name that matches no page above is ignored with a warning in the plugin log, so a typo fails loudly instead of looking like it disabled something. Adding pages of your own is not what this setting is for: the agent's hindsight_capture_initiative tool already creates pages, one per initiative, each with its own query.

Pages of your own — customPages

pages only reworks the five above. To add a page, name it under customPages:

{
  "customPages": {
    "Security posture": {
      "source_query": "What are this project's security decisions — authn, secrets handling, PII, dependency policy — and what do they constrain in new code?",
      "tags": ["knowledge:decision"],
    },
    "Operational runbook": {
      "source_query": "How does this project get deployed, monitored and rolled back? What has broken in production, and what fixed it?",
    },
  },
}

source_query is required. tags is optional and picks which facts feed the page — one of the tier tags above, or any tag you stamp on your own writes with retainTags. Omit it and the page draws on everything the bank holds: a refresh matches tags with all, so no tags means no tag constraint, not an empty page.

Your pages are seeded at the same root as the taxonomy, on the same refresh schedule, and re-synced from the config the same way — reword one here and the live page follows on the next session. They compose with pages, so trading two built-ins for one of your own is just both settings at once.

Why it is a separate setting. pages refuses a name that matches no seeded page, and that is what makes a typo loud: if an unknown key there meant "create this page", "Componnet map" would quietly create an empty second page instead of rewording the one you meant. For the same reason, naming a seeded page under customPages is refused — reword it under pages.

A page you create yourself in the control plane is a third thing again, and the plugin never touches it: the seed pass only visits the pages it is configured to own.

A bank you shape yourself — manageBankConfig

Pointed at a bank, this plugin gives it the shape its ingestion needs: retain strategies for the kinds of document it writes (git, gitlog, conversation, document, survey), a knowledge entity-label group that routes facts to the knowledge pages, and — on a bank that has no missions of its own — the coding missions.

It only ever adds what is missing. A strategy you defined, an edit you made to one of the plugin's, a reworded label group, a mission you rewrote in the control plane: each is left exactly as it is, on every session, forever. What the bank already says wins. The cost of that promise is that a plugin release which rewords an existing strategy or label does not reach a bank that already has it. To take the current default back, clear that override on the bank (delete the strategy, or the whole retain_strategies entry, in the control plane): the next session finds the bank silent there and seeds it again.

One field is the exception: the extraction mode of the plugin's own four strategies (git, gitlog, conversation, document) follows retainExtractionMode and is put back on every session if it drifts — the same way a seeded page's query is. Change it in coding-agent.json, not in the control plane. The strategies' other fields, and your own strategies, are still left alone.

Set manageBankConfig: false to keep the plugin out of the bank's configuration altogether — the right setting for a bank you share with non-coding work, or one you configure yourself. That bank should then define the five strategies above itself. Note that the miss is silent: the server does not reject a retain naming a strategy the bank lacks, it logs a warning and extracts with the bank's own configuration — so a commit diff, a session transcript and a survey marker would all get the same generic treatment instead of the extraction each needs. Knowledge pages are seeded either way; pageTriggerType governs what they cost.

Like every field here it can be set per bank, which is usually where it belongs:

{
  "bankId": "my-global-bank",
  "banks": { "my-global-bank": { "manageBankConfig": false } }
}

Per-repo opt-in/out — banks.<bankId>

Per-repo control lives in the SAME file, keyed by the resolved bank id (shown in the session banner) and applied AFTER bank resolution — so it works regardless of where the repo lives, and survives directory moves:

{
  "banks": {
    "coding-agent::secret-client": { "disabled": true }, // blacklist: no memory at all
    "coding-agent::old-name": { "bank": "team::shared" }, // rename / converge banks
    "coding-agent::big-mono": { "gitIngest": "full", "retainSessions": false },
  },
}

Any behavioral field can be overridden per bank, and bank renames the destination (single hop: the section is selected by the resolved id, the target is literal — several ids may converge on one shared bank, and the target's own section is not consulted). Other bank-resolution fields are ignored inside a bank section.

Recipe: two repos, one shared bank

Two ways, by what the natural key is:

By resolved id — you know the repo names; works wherever the repos live (and keeps working if they move). Both ids converge on one literal target:

{
  "banks": {
    "coding-agent::backend": { "bank": "team::product" },
    "coding-agent::frontend": { "bank": "team::product" },
  },
}

By path prefix — the repos live under one directory; a single mapPathToBank entry covers every repo (present and future) beneath it:

{
  "mapPathToBank": { "/Users/me/work/client-x": "client-x-memory" },
}

Rule of thumb: converge by id for a hand-picked set of repos; map by path when a folder is the boundary ("everything I clone under work/client-x shares memory").

Bank resolution

Coding memory is per repository. Resolution order for the working directory:

1. mapPathToBank — longest matching absolute-path prefix (mapping a repo root covers every subdirectory; deeper mappings win; overrides even an explicit bankId).
2. Static — bankId set (or dynamicBankId: false).
3. Dynamic — bankIdTemplate with placeholders:
   • {gitProject} — worktree-aware repo name: git rev-parse --git-common-dir resolves every linked worktree to the main worktree's basename, so all worktrees of a repo share one bank (bare repos use the bare dir name). Outside a repo there is nothing for git to resolve, so it falls back to the basename of the directory the session started in — an agent that cds into a subdirectory keeps writing to one bank, and a subdirectory gets its own bank only when you deliberately start a session there
   • {project} — plain working-directory basename
   • {harness} — the entry point asking (opencode, claude-code, codex, antigravity-cli, cursor-cli, copilot-cli)
   • {channel} / {user} — $HINDSIGHT_CHANNEL_ID / $HINDSIGHT_USER_ID

The default "coding-agent::{gitProject}" is harness-neutral, so opencode, Claude Code, and Codex all share one memory per repo — use "{harness}-{gitProject}" to split per agent instead.

Recording where a memory came from

With a bank per repo, the bank is the answer to "where did this come from". On a deliberately shared bank — one bank holding cross-project knowledge so facts recall everywhere — it isn't: every memory looks alike. retainTags and retainMetadata stamp that provenance onto conversations, git history and diffs, survey lifecycle documents, initiative markers, and documents saved through hindsight_ingest_document:

{
  "bankId": "shared", // one bank for everything
  "retainTags": ["project:{gitProject}", "env:work"],
  "retainMetadata": { "repo": "{gitProject}" },
}

Recalls can then filter by project:<repo>, and every document shows which repository it came out of. Both accept the same placeholders as bankIdTemplate — {gitProject}, {project}, {harness}, {channel}, {user} — plus {bankId}, {sessionId} and {timestamp}. {gitProject} is worktree-aware here too, so every linked worktree of a repo stamps one name. {sessionId} resolves to unknown for documents that do not originate from an agent session.

The plugin's own source: and harness: tags are reserved: entries in those namespaces are ignored with a warning, so a document's agent attribution always reflects the agent that actually wrote it.

One set of beliefs per repo

Every document this integration writes carries provenance tags — source:chat, harness:<id>, knowledge:<kind>, plus anything from retainTags. Those tags say who wrote a memory; they are what filters recall and draws each document's agent logo, and they stay on the facts.

They are not, however, a good boundary for observations. Consolidation's own default (combined) builds one observation set per distinct tag set, so the same repository worked on by two agents would grow two parallel sets of beliefs — one per harness — that never merge, each blind to the other, at double the consolidation cost. Which agent happened to be typing does not change whether a convention or a decision is true.

So the integration retains with observationScopes: "shared": one global, untagged observation scope per bank, which is what a bank already is — one project's memory. Set the field to change it:

{
  "observationScopes": "combined", // one observation set per distinct tag set (server default)
  "banks": {
    "coding-agent::mono": { "observationScopes": "per_tag" }, // per-repo, like any behavioral field
  },
}

Splitting code from conversation — per_source

shared puts every document a repo produces into one belief set. "per_source" keeps that set and adds one per origin, so "what the commits say" and "what was decided in conversation" can be asked apart:

{ "observationScopes": "per_source" }

Each document consolidates into the global scope plus one named for each source: tag it carries — [[], ["source:chat"]] for a session transcript, [[], ["source:git"]] for a commit diff. Read an axis back with tags: ["source:git"], tags_match: "exact", and the merged view with tags: [], tags_match: "exact".

A document carrying two source: tags gets a scope for each, and that is deliberate rather than duplication. The commit-message seed is tagged source:git and source:git-log, so source:git-log is fed only by the seed — what the commit messages say — while source:git also collects every per-commit diff under gitIngest: "full". Two questions, two answers, each deduplicated within itself by consolidation. A fact belonging to more than one axis is the point.

This cannot be expressed as a scope list. The server treats an explicit list[list[str]] as unconditional — it is not filtered against the memory's own tags — so a configured [[], ["source:git"], ["source:chat"]] writes every document into all three, and the source:git scope fills with beliefs built from chat transcripts. Only a per-document decision separates them.

It costs one extra consolidation pass per document, and it reads only source:, so a volatile provenance tag never becomes a scope. The global scope is still written first and unchanged, so the untagged observations knowledge pages read are unaffected.

"per_tag" and "all_combinations" split further still, and an explicit [["project:demo"], …] declares the scopes literally. HINDSIGHT_OBSERVATION_SCOPES sets the scalar modes; a scope list is file-only. Changing this does not rewrite observations already consolidated under the old scoping — they stay where they were built, and new work accrues under the new setting.

Diagnostics & logging

All logs live in ~/.hindsight/coding-agents-logs/ (owner-only). Each file rotates to <file>.1 at 10 MB.

Leveled plugin log (humans debugging): ~/.hindsight/coding-agents-logs/plugin.log (override HINDSIGHT_LOG_FILE) — timestamped LEVEL [scope] message lines from every component, including the ingestion engine. Level defaults to info; set "logLevel": "debug" in config or HINDSIGHT_LOG_LEVEL=debug for ad-hoc debugging (at debug, every diag event below is mirrored here too, so one file tells the whole story).

Structured diag events (machines/harnesses): every reflect and page-fetch outcome is appended as a JSON line to ~/.hindsight/coding-agents-logs/diag.jsonl (override with HINDSIGHT_DIAG_FILE):

{
  "ts": "2026-07-27T07:05:52Z",
  "harness": "claude-code",
  "event": "reflect_ok",
  "ms": 14210,
  "chars": 792,
  "query": "..."
}

reflect_failed / pages_failed record the error; if you're comparing memory-on vs memory-off, check this file — a run whose reflects failed is a no-memory run. When the failure was a timeout or a 5xx, the hook falls back to knowledge-page search and, if no page matches, to a raw recall of the bank's memories: reflect_fallback_pages / reflect_fallback_observations record what each step returned (*_failed when it errored). Seed starts are logged as seed_started.

When autoInject names a retrieval source instead of reflect, that source records its own outcome with the number of items it returned: inject_pages for "pages", inject_recall for "recall" (inject_pages_failed / inject_recall_failed when the call errored). No reflect event is written on those turns — nothing reflected.

Tool usage (is the agent using Hindsight?): one JSON line per finished user turn in ~/.hindsight/coding-agents-logs/usage.jsonl (override HINDSIGHT_USAGE_FILE) — the hindsight_* tools the agent called during that turn, and whether its reply credited Hindsight memory ("From Hindsight memory"). The credit rate counts only turns that called a retrieval tool (search, list, read, reflect); saving a document is not expected to be credited. Recorded when the session is written back, so a scope with retainSessions: false records none. It never leaves your machine. Summarize it per agent with:

npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents stats

Is the memory ready yet?

hindsight_sync_status — the agent-facing tool, dist/status.js for scripts — answers exactly that: "synced": true means the seeded memory is queryable. It also reports gitlog freshness, how far per-commit deepening has got, the codebase survey's state (surveyBaseline is the HEAD the last survey started from, surveyDocs counts the findings documents that have landed, 0–4 — a baseline with no findings retries automatically), and the extraction operations still in flight.

Resetting a repo's memory

Delete its bank on the server. The bank is the only state this integration keeps, so the next session in that repo is a true first open — seed and survey run again from scratch. There are no client-side files to clean up.

Marker documents you may notice

Two document ids exist for the machinery's own bookkeeping. Both are safe to ignore and safe to delete:

• survey-baseline:<sha> — reads "🛰️ researching…" while a codebase survey runs and flips to "✅ completed" once its findings land. It is retained under the survey strategy, whose marker rule extracts nothing from a status marker, and it drives the re-survey cadence (surveyRefreshCommits) and surveyBaseline in sync status.
• gitlog:<repo> — the aggregated commit-message seed document, re-upserted rather than duplicated when the seed runs again.

When memory seems to be missing

Failures never break the agent: a reflect, page fetch or retain that fails degrades to an ordinary memoryless turn and is recorded in the logs. "No memory" is therefore a log question — check the diag file for whether session_start and deepen_started ever fired for that bank. A session that was already running when the plugin was installed has no SessionStart behind it; its first prompt after the install self-heals.