Show HN: Hippo, biologically inspired memory for AI agents
by kitfunso on 4/6/2026, 9:49:34 PM
https://github.com/kitfunso/hippo-memory
Comments
by: nberkman
Cool project. I like the neuroscience analogy with decay and consolidation.<p>I've been working on a related problem from the other direction: Claude Code and Codex already persist full session transcripts, but there's no good way to search across them. So I built ccrider (<a href="https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider</a>). It indexes existing sessions into SQLite FTS5 and exposes an MCP server so agents can query their own conversation history without a separate memory layer. Basically treating it as a retrieval problem rather than a storage problem.
4/6/2026, 10:37:06 PM
by: kami23
Cool to see others on this thread.<p>Here's a post I wrote about how we can start to potentially mimic mechanisms<p><a href="https://n0tls.com/2026-03-14-musings.html" rel="nofollow">https://n0tls.com/2026-03-14-musings.html</a><p>Would love to compare notes, I'm also looking at linguistic phenomena through an LLM lens<p><a href="https://n0tls.com/2026-03-19-more-musings.html" rel="nofollow">https://n0tls.com/2026-03-19-more-musings.html</a><p>Hoping to wrap up some of the kaggle eval work and move back to researching more neuropsych.
4/6/2026, 11:16:13 PM
by: swyx
hmm the repo doesnt mention this at all but this name and problem domain brings up HippoRAG <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14831" rel="nofollow">https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14831</a> <- any relation? seems odd to miss out this exactly similarly named paper with related techniques.
4/6/2026, 11:24:17 PM
by: the_arun
Aren't tools like claude already store context by project in file system? Also any reason use "capture" instead of "export" (an obvious opposite of import)?
4/6/2026, 10:40:49 PM
by: matt765
cool project mate, gj
4/7/2026, 12:32:33 AM
by: gfody
yegge has a cool solution for this in gastown: the current agent is able to hold a seance with the previous one
4/6/2026, 11:07:09 PM
by: cyanydeez
no open code plugin? This seems like something that should just run in the background. It's well documented that it should just be a skill agents can use when they get into various fruitless states.<p>The "biological" memory strength shouldn't just be a time thing, and even then, the time of the AI agent should only be conformed to the AI's lifetime and not the actual clock. Look up <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3523442/difference-between-clock-realtime-and-clock-monotonic" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3523442/difference-betwe...</a> monotonic clock. If you want a decay, it shouldn't be related to an actual clock, but it's work time.<p>But memory is more about triggers than it is about anything else. So you should absolutely have memory triggers based on location. Something like a path hash. So whever an agent is working and remembering things it should be tightly compacted to that location; only where a "compaction" happens should these memories become more and more generalized to locations.<p>The types of memory that often are more prominent are like this, whether it's sports or GUIs, physical location triggers much more intrinsics than conscious memory. Focus on how to trigger recall based on project paths, filenames in the path, file path names, etc.
4/6/2026, 10:13:16 PM
by: esafak
How does it select what to forget? Let's say I land a PR that introduces a sharp change, migrating from one thing to another. An exponential decay won't catch this. Biological learning makes sense when things we observe similar things repeatedly in order to learn patterns. I am skeptical that it applies to learning the commits of one code base.
4/6/2026, 11:27:03 PM
by: bambushu
[dead]
4/6/2026, 11:47:40 PM