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claude-mem-house, in plain language

What is claude-mem?

Claude Code (the AI coding assistant) can remember things between sessions - your preferences, project notes, decisions you made last week. Normally that memory lives only on one computer. This house runs a shared version instead: one memory server on the main PC that every computer in the house can read from and write to, so any machine's Claude Code already knows what you told Claude on a different machine.

What's in this toolkit

Four small setup scripts, each doing one job:

  1. "Connect this computer to the shared memory" - claude-mem-client-setup.ps1. Run it once on a house PC and its Claude Code can now search the shared memory.
  2. "Make this computer a backup of the shared memory" - claude-mem-standby-setup.ps1 (plus a one-time claude-mem-standby-prereqs.ps1 to install the software it needs). Turns a second computer into a live mirror that copies the shared memory every hour, so if the main PC is off or broken, there's a recent backup ready to take over.
  3. "Point this computer at a different memory server" - claude-mem-switch-server.ps1. Used during an outage to switch a computer from the broken server to the backup, and switch back once things are fixed.

Why credentials are never in these files

Two secret values make this work: an API key (like a password for the memory server) and a database password (for the backup copies). Early drafts of these scripts had both typed directly into the file - anyone who could read the script could read the secret. That's been fixed: the scripts now ask for those two values from the computer's environment (or a command-line option) instead, and refuse to do anything - no network call, no data touched - until they're supplied. The real values live in a password vault, not in this repository.

What happens if the main PC breaks

That's the whole point of the backup ("standby") setup. A second computer already has a copy of the shared memory that's at most an hour old. Someone runs one command on every other computer to point them at the backup instead, and everything keeps working. When the main PC comes back, another command pulls back anything written during the outage and switches everyone back.

Where to look next

  • README.md - the technical usage instructions.
  • docs/technical/ARCHITECTURE.md - diagrams of how the pieces connect.
  • docs/technical/SECURITY.md - exactly what secret-scanning was done before this repository was created, and what was found and fixed.
  • TESTING.md - how these scripts are tested, and an honest note about a gap.