Cortexes

Cortexes

  A personal knowledge vault plugin for Claude Code — session recording, memory distillation, semantic retrieval.

  English · 繁體中文

What It Does

Cortexes turns your working memory into a searchable knowledge base. Every
Claude Code session gets automatically recorded when it ends, then can be
distilled and retrieved later.

- Automatic capture — a full report (commits, findings, decisions) is
  generated when a session ends and saved to the vault
- Semantic search — OpenAI embeddings + ChromaDB, with mixed Chinese/English
  query support
- Knowledge distillation — extracts hard-won lessons, internal
  conventions, and key decisions from raw session dumps
- Memory injection — detects the current repo at session start and offers
  to load related memory

Design philosophy: the vault is the source of truth (plain markdown +
git); the vector store is just a rebuildable derived index.

Quick Start

1. Install the plugin

The marketplace is named cortex and the plugin inside it is cortexes —
hence cortexes@cortex. The marketplace name is kept from 1.x on purpose so
that existing marketplace add registrations keep working.

2. Install the cortex-vec CLI

The CLI is published on PyPI as
cortex-vec:

Upgrade with uv tool upgrade cortex-vec (or pip install -U cortex-vec)
after a plugin update. /cortexes:genesis checks for the CLI and offers this
install when it is missing. To run the unreleased development version
instead, install from the repo:

OPENAI_API_KEY is optional. Setting it enables embeddings, and with
them semantic (vector) search. Without it nothing breaks: search runs on
the local BM25 index, entirely on your machine and with nothing sent to
OpenAI — see Environment Variables.

3. Initialize

This sets the vault path and author info, and builds the…