Three months ago, I dropped a project here called Vestige, a local MCP memory server for Claude built on cognitive science rather than brute-force vector search.
The philosophy was simple: Claude shouldn’t just hoard data forever. It should remember more like we do. Useful memories stay hot. Stale ones lose their influence. Context and contradictions actually matter.
That first post blew up way more than I expected, and the feedback from this community was incredible. You guys hit me with the hard questions:
Is the neuroscience stuff actually useful, or is it just marketing?
If memory decays, will Claude drop the ball on important decisions?
Aren't all these MCP tools a bit over-engineered?
Why not just use a standard vector DB or CLAUDE.md?
So I took that feedback, put my head down, and kept building.
Vestige is now at v2.1.0.
It’s still open source, still Rust, still local-first, still backed by SQLite, and still an MCP server. But it has evolved. It’s no longer just "a memory" for Claude, it’s a full cognitive memory layer.
The biggest shift? Vestige now actively helps Claude reason, suppress misleading data, catch contradictions, dream/consolidate, predict what it needs next, and self-check.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s changed since launch:
- Deep Reference
Instead of just spitting back "here are 10 similar docs," Claude can now ask Vestige to actually reason across memories using an 8-stage pipeline:
hybrid retrieval → reranking → spreading activation → FSRS trust scoring → temporal supersession → contradiction analysis → relation assessment → reasoning-chain generation.
So now, Vestige hands Claude the primary evidence, supporting and contradicting memories, confidence scores, reasons why a memory is trusted or stale, and a full reasoning scaffold. This is the update that made it stop feeling like a database and start feeling like a real second brain.
- Active Forgetting
People were the most skeptical about this one, so naturally, I went deeper.
Vestige now features explicit, top-down suppression. We're not deleting. We're not demoting. We are suppressing. If a memory is misleading, stale, or derailing the current reasoning path, it gets inhibited. It stays in the DB, but its retrieval pressure tanks. Related memories can even decay through a Rac1-inspired cascade. (And if you catch it in the labile window, suppression can be reversed).
The point is: forgetting isn't data loss. It’s having control over what gets to influence Claude.
- The 3D Memory Dashboard
AI memory is usually a total black box—you have zero clue what the model thinks it knows.
To fix that, Vestige now ships with a built-in visual dashboard. You can watch the memory graph react live. You can actually see retention states, suppressed memories, contradiction arcs, duplicate concepts, dream insights, and activation spreads happening in real-time. The memory system is finally inspectable.
- Autopilot Mode
Originally, Vestige just sat there waiting for Claude to call a tool. Not anymore.
Now there’s an event subscriber in the backend. When memories are created, searched, promoted, suppressed, or scored, Vestige automatically routes those events into the cognitive engine. Predictive memory, synaptic tagging, activation spread, prospective polling, and auto-consolidation can now fire in the background without Claude manually asking.
A memory system shouldn't just answer queries. It should manage itself.
- The Cognitive Sandwich
This is the massive v2.1.0 feature. Vestige can now wrap Claude Code with opt-in hooks before and after Claude responds.
Before Claude thinks: Vestige can inject relevant memories, current git/CWD state, fresh dream insights, and run a lateral-thinking preflight.
After Claude drafts a response: Vestige runs a fast veto detector, a synthesis validator, and a local "Sanhedrin" verifier.
The Sanhedrin Executioner is wild. It runs mlx-community/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-4bit through mlx_lm.server right on Apple Silicon. No Anthropic API calls. No cloud round trips. It checks Claude’s draft against high-trust Vestige evidence and can veto the answer before you even see it.
This is the part I’m most excited about: Vestige is no longer just memory. It is becoming a strict cognitive guardrail around Claude.
Where It Is Now
The original version was about making Claude remember. This version is about making Claude behave differently because it remembers.
If an API endpoint changes, Vestige surfaces that the old memory is stale. If Claude starts confidently summarizing something incorrectly, the local Sanhedrin layer vetoes the draft and forces a correction. If a memory keeps misleading the agent, you suppress it instead of deleting it. If you step away for a few days, Autopilot continues linking, decaying, and consolidating memories in the background.
Huge thank you to everyone who has contributed, opened issues, tested installs, challenged the architecture, or just starred the repo. Vestige is almost at 500 stars and climbing, and a lot of the absolute best changes came directly from this community's feedback.