I Gave My AI a Memory

I had a dream. Not the inspirational kind. A practical, slightly obsessive dream that had been nagging me for years. I wanted a system that remembers what I know. Not a notes app, not a wiki, not another tool that promises "second brain" and delivers a folder structure. An actual memory. Something I could ask "what did we discuss about the Zoom integration last month?" and get a real answer. I tried building it. A lot. Every attempt died the same way: too much manual work. The technology wasn't there. LLMs could sort of understand text, but they couldn't search it reliably, couldn't integrate with my existing workflow, couldn't run locally without eating all my vRAM. Then, over Christmas 2025, it worked. The pain that started it The immediate trigger was copy-paste. I'd be in a Claude Code session, working on something, and I'd need context from an email. So I'd switch to Gmail, find the thread, copy the relevant bits, paste them into the conversation. Five minutes later I'd need a Sla