[HN Gopher] Show HN: Hippo, biologically inspired memory for AI ...
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       Show HN: Hippo, biologically inspired memory for AI agents
        
       Author : kitfunso
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2026-04-06 21:49 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | cyanydeez wrote:
       | 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.
       | 
       | 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
       | https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3523442/difference-betwe...
       | monotonic clock. If you want a decay, it shouldn't be related to
       | an actual clock, but it's work time.
       | 
       | 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.
       | 
       | 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.
        
         | kitfunso wrote:
         | coming right up, adding it as we speak
        
         | russellthehippo wrote:
         | yep came here to say this. great to hear it's in process.
        
         | Grosvenor wrote:
         | Sparse distributed memory is what you're looking for.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparse_distributed_memory
        
       | nberkman wrote:
       | Cool project. I like the neuroscience analogy with decay and
       | consolidation.
       | 
       | 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
       | (https://github.com/neilberkman/ccrider). 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.
        
       | the_arun wrote:
       | 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)?
        
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       (page generated 2026-04-06 23:00 UTC)