deja-vu
Memory for coding agents — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and 17 others. Indexes the sessions they already wrote to disk, including months from before you installed it, and recalls them in any of them. No LLM, no embeddings, one local Go binary.
Install / Use
npx skills add vshulcz/deja-vuInstalls into whichever agent you are using.
SKILL.md
Installable skill definition
Quality Score
Category
AI & Machine LearningSupported Platforms
Skill content
View source on GitHubInstall
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/main/install.sh | sh
deja install --auto
Ten seconds to install, about ten to index, and it is useful. The second command wires MCP recall into every agent it finds, turns on session-start recall where the agent supports it, and builds the first index so the next session does not pay for it.
Start a new agent session and ask it something you worked on months ago:
have we dealt with jwt refresh rotation before? check your memory
It does not have to be asked, either — with auto-recall the agent already knows what you solved in that project when the session opens.
<details> <summary>Other ways to install, and what to do if you want less than all of it</summary>brew install vshulcz/tap/deja-vu, go install github.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/cmd/deja@latest,
or npx @vshulcz/deja-vu "query" to try it without installing anything. Desktop apps that
take MCP servers as bundles can open the .mcpb from the
latest release; it carries the binary.
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Qwen, OpenClaw and Copilot can take the same plugin bundle from their own marketplaces instead:
claude plugin marketplace add vshulcz/deja-vu && claude plugin install deja-vu@deja-vu
On Windows the install script exits with unsupported OS — it is a shell script. Take
deja-vu_<version>_windows_amd64.zip from the
latest release and put deja.exe on
your PATH, e.g. in %USERPROFILE%\.local\bin.
The binary alone is a complete install for searching: index, search, show, ctx, blame,
--json and redaction need nothing else. deja install is what wires MCP into your agents
and turns on session-start recall — worth having, and optional. On a binary-only setup
deja doctor reports every MCP target as not-wired, which is that setup working as
intended. deja warmup also leaves a skill at ~/.agents/skills/deja-search/SKILL.md
that teaches an agent the CLI contract — deja search --json, ctx, blame, how to read
tier and total — so it knows history is searchable without MCP. The copy in the repo is
skills/deja-search/SKILL.md.
deja install --all is --auto without the session-start recall: agents answer from memory
when they decide to call it, rather than starting each session with it. The
agent setup guide covers what each
harness supports, aider's read-only context file, and the Windows cmd /c deja mcp wrapper.
Install also writes user-level guidance for the harnesses it detects: Claude Code, Codex, opencode, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, Qwen, Kimi Code, pi, Copilot, Cursor, Goose, OpenClaw, Hermes, Roo Code, omp, DeepSeek Harness and Zed each get it in their own guidance file (or under the configured XDG_CONFIG_HOME). Re-run rewrites deja's skill or marked block without changing surrounding user content. Use deja install --all --no-guidance to opt out; Grok gets ~/.grok/GROK.md, which it reads only when a project has no .grok/GROK.md of its own. Cursor has no user-level instructions file, so it gets a skill at ~/.cursor/skills/ instead, read only when something looks relevant rather than every session.
What you get
Solve it in Codex. Claude remembers. Twenty coding agents write every conversation to local files, and deja turns those files into one memory layer all of them read.
| | |
| --- | --- |
| Retroactive search | deja "connection pool exhausted" over gigabytes, including everything from before you installed deja. Natural-language questions fall back to a relevance tier. Time is a hint, not a filter. |
| Cross-agent recall | The MCP recall tool answers "we fixed this three weeks ago" in whichever agent asks, whoever solved it originally. |
| It survives compaction | Measured over 43 compactions: the summary keeps 77% of the decisions and 0.2% of the commands you ran. deja hands back the other 99.8%. |
| Recall at the point of action | Before an agent edits a file or runs a command, deja names that file's prior decision or that command's working invocation, from a PreToolUse hook. When a command fails, a PostToolUse hook answers with what followed that same error here before — the pair an agent never thinks to ask for. |
| It indexes the work, not just the talk | The files each turn opened, the commands that ran with their exit status, and the exact spans an edit replaced. That is the part every summary throws away. |
| | |
| --- | --- |
| It knows what held | deja promote <id> --state rejected --note "why" marks a decision you reverted. Every later hit for that session shows it was tried and rejected, with the reason. Nothing is deleted, and --state accepted takes the mark back. |
| It says when the ground moved | A hit reports 4 files this session touched have changed since, and says nothing when it cannot tell. It never claims anything is unchanged. |
| Sync and handoff | deja sync ssh laptop moves memory between machines, append-only, no cloud in the middle. deja handoff --to codex packages the live context so you can continue in another agent. |
| Redaction | Keys, tokens, JWTs and private key blocks are stripped at index time, so the cache is safe to keep. |
Your own work, wrapped
deja stats --card draws it in the terminal; give it a filename and it writes an
SVG for a profile README.
The full feature reference lives in the docs.
Privacy
Indexing and search are local. The network is used only by deja update, deja sync ssh,
and the version check in deja doctor.
Credentials are redacted at index time: AWS keys, api_key= and token= assignments,
bearer tokens and raw JWTs, PEM private key blocks, provider tokens, scheme://user:pass@host
URLs, and high-entropy values for shapes no pattern knows. The value becomes
[redacted:<kind>] and the surrounding text stays searchable. deja share and
deja sync export re-apply redaction on the way out.
deja forget removes sessions from a rebuilt index and writes tombstones, so a later
deja index cannot restore them from the source history. --unforget lifts a tombstone.
Project exclusions are one pattern per line in ~/.config/deja/exclude.
The security model documents data flows, redaction limits, trust assumptions and release verification.
CLI
$ deja "jwt refresh token"
[claude] api · Jul 8 · 8f31c0a9 — 2 matches
login started failing after refresh token rotation; jwt kid mismatch in tests
fixed by reloading jwks cache after rotateKey and adding a clock-skew test
[codex] web · Jul 1 · b77d91e2 — 1 match
refresh token cookie needed SameSite=Lax in local callback flow
Ask your history
| Command | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| deja <query> | Search every history. Multi-word is AND and quoted phrases require contiguous text; a query with no exact match then tries word forms and close spellings, which is where a substring reaches its word (code finds opencode). |
| deja | With an index and a terminal: today's sessions, recalls served, a question you asked in more than one session, and a wall your agents keep hitting. |
| deja blame <path> | Which sessions discussed a file, what was decided, and why. |
| deja files <topic> | The other direction: which files the work on a subject actually touched. |
| deja how <tool> | How this machine actually runs a thing, with the real flags, from what agents ran before. |
| deja fix <error> | What this machine ran after that same error before, when the error did not come back. |
| deja friction | Errors that hit three or more separate sessions, with the harnesses named. |
Use what it finds
| Command | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| deja ctx <query> | Markdown digest of the best match, ready to pipe into a prompt. |
| deja resume <id> | Reopen a found session in its native harness. |
| deja restore <path> | Hand back a span an agent replaced, from the old_string its edit recorded. Never writes over the original. |
| deja promote <id> | Distill a session into a curated note with provenance, tags and a lifecycle state. Notes outrank raw transcripts. |
| deja share <id> | A sanitized session digest for a colleague, with secrets already scrubbed. |
Move it and check it
| Command | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| deja sync export/import/ssh | Move memory between machines. Watermarked, append-only, idempotent. |
| deja view | Your whole memory as one local HTML file. No server, nothing leaves the machine. |
| deja stats | Your agent work, wrapped. --card draws it in the terminal, --card <file>.svg writes one for a profile, --html a browsable timeline. |
| deja doctor [--deep] | Self-diagnosis, and with --deep, proof of the index against the sources. |
| `
Truncated for display — read the full file on GitHub.
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