July 15, 2026
AI finally found its receipts
Open-source memory for coding agents, synced over SSH
Your coding bot keeps forgetting everything — and commenters are already debating if this fixes it
TLDR: Deja is a new offline tool that lets coding assistants search their old conversations so they stop re-solving the same problems. Commenters loved the keep-it-local privacy angle, but some immediately challenged what’s actually new here beyond the secure syncing and searchable chat history.
A tiny tool called deja just landed with a very relatable pitch: your coding assistant may act smart, but apparently it has the memory of a goldfish. The app scoops up old chat logs from tools like Claude Code and Codex, makes them searchable in milliseconds, and can even feed the right old fix back into a new session before you ask. The creator’s big selling point? It stays on your computer, strips out secrets like passwords and private keys, and can sync between machines over ordinary secure shell connections instead of sending your history off to some mystery cloud.
But the real action is in the comments, where the crowd instantly split into classic internet factions. One camp was into the privacy-first vibe, cheering that it’s local and easy to inspect by hand instead of becoming yet another hosted service. Another camp basically said, “Cute, but what makes this different?” with one commenter bluntly asking whether the only real twist is the secure syncing. Then came the philosophy crowd, trying to reduce “AI memory” to its simplest form: save everything, search it later, stuff the useful bits back into the next prompt — done? And of course Hacker News wouldn’t be Hacker News without a niche joke flying in from orbit: one user deadpanned that they’re still waiting for an agent memory system for a local mainframe database emulator. In other words, half the thread is practical, half is skeptical, and all of it is wonderfully nerdy chaos.
Key Points
- •Deja is a local, open-source memory tool that indexes existing session histories from Claude Code, Codex, and opencode.
- •The tool supports direct search, MCP-based agent recall, and automatic context injection through a SessionStart hook.
- •The article states that searches run in 7–9 milliseconds over gigabytes of previously stored logs.
- •Sensitive data such as API keys, JWTs, and private keys is redacted during indexing, and shared session digests are sanitized.
- •Deja can sync memory between machines through shared folders or directly over SSH using append-only, idempotent JSONL exports and imports.