Brainstem

Local-first knowledge backend for AI agents.

Connect any MCP host — Claude Code, Cursor, or your own agent harness — to a personal knowledge engine: an Obsidian-compatible wiki with indexed retrieval, token-budgeted memory recall, and secure ingestion. Your agents get quality context; you keep your knowledge on your machine.

┌────────────┐   MCP (stdio/sse)   ┌───────────────────────────────┐
│ Your agent │ ◄─────────────────► │ Brainstem                     │
│ (Claude    │   27 tools          │  · search + read + write wiki │
│  Code,     │   (12 read-only)    │  · memory tree recall (BM25 + │
│  Cursor…)  │                     │    vectors, token-budgeted)   │
└────────────┘                     │  · code graph over your repos │
                                   │  · vault = plain Markdown     │
                                   └───────────────────────────────┘

Install

# Run without installing (recommended)
uvx brainstem-mcp init

# Or install
pip install brainstem-mcp
brainstem init

brainstem init creates a vault at ~/.brainstem/vault (override with --root) and prints the exact one-liner to connect your agent:

claude mcp add brainstem -- uvx brainstem-mcp mcp --root ~/.brainstem/vault

That's it. No API key is required to serve, search, and read — your agent brings its own model.

Related MCP server: vault-memory

Docker

docker build -t brainstem .
docker run -i -v ~/.brainstem/vault:/vault brainstem            # stdio
docker run -p 8765:8765 -v ~/.brainstem/vault:/vault brainstem \
  mcp --root /vault --transport sse                             # sse

What your agent can do

• Search & read — search_wiki_index, read_wiki_file, cross-references, orphan detection over a plain-Markdown Obsidian-compatible vault.

• Remember & recall — a hierarchical memory tree with BM25 + vector search and token-budgeted memory_tree_recall, built for agent context windows.

• Write knowledge — structured pages with YAML frontmatter, index upkeep, supersession instead of duplication.

• Understand code — ingest a repository and query its architecture (ask_repo, code-graph overview/impact) as part of your agent's context.

Read-only profile

Expose only the 12 safe read tools (no writes, no publishing):

brainstem mcp --readonly

Security posture

Brainstem treats everything it ingests as untrusted input: ingested content cannot trigger writes or publishing on its own, and outbound actions are draft-only by design. The vault is plain Markdown on your disk — no cloud, no telemetry, single-tenant by architecture.

Brainstem vs. OpenWiki

OpenWiki generates documentation that agents read as files. Brainstem is a live backend: your agent queries an indexed knowledge base through MCP tools at run time — retrieval, memory, and ingestion as part of the harness, not a batch-generated artifact.

License

MIT