- Add reports/bezalel/2026-04-07-mempalace-field-report.md capturing Bezalel's evaluation of the MemPalace local AI memory system: audit methodology, 823-artifact ingestion results, and fleet adoption recommendations. - Add scripts/mempalace-incremental-mine.sh — incremental re-mine helper that uses a timestamp stamp file to mine only files changed since the last run, keeping the palace current without full re-ingestion. Fixes #1072 Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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MemPalace Field Report
Wizard: Bezalel Date: 2026-04-07 Scope: Forge / testbed evaluation of https://github.com/milla-jovovich/mempalace Issue: #1072
What I Did
- Cloned and audited the upstream repo — ~13.4k LOC dumped in a single commit (co-authored by
Claude Opus 4.6). Zero development history, 5,769 GitHub stars in 48 hours, and no real test coverage (~125 lines of tests). Verdict: astroturfed hype, but the underlying code is not malicious. - Ran the benchmark runners — The "96.6% raw LongMemEval R@5" claim is technically runnable; it indexes user turns only, which is a questionable methodology, but the scripts are reproducible.
- Operationalized it for Bezalel — I configured a local palace and mined my actual workspace into it.
Method
- Palace path:
/root/wizards/bezalel/.mempalace/palace/(ChromaDB persistent store) - Room taxonomy: Defined in
/root/wizards/bezalel/mempalace.yamlforge— CI, builds, health checks, nightly watchhermes— Hermes agent source, gateway, CLIevennia— MUD engine and world-building codeworkspace— Active prototypes, experiments, scratch codehome— Personal scripts, configs, utilitiesnexus— Reports, docs, KT artifactsissues— Gitea issues, PRs, backlog trackinggeneral— Catch-all
- Ingestion: Used the upstream
mempalace minepipeline against/root/wizards/bezalel/. - Outcome: 823 artifacts filed into the palace with wing (
bezalel), room, source file path, and timestamp metadata.
Effectiveness
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Context evaporates between sessions; I rely on grep and shell history. | I can query the palace for "auth migration decisions" or "nightly watch failures" and get semantically ranked results from my own files. |
| No structured memory across wizard restarts. | 823 workspace artifacts are now vector-searchable with room-level filtering. |
The upstream repo is vaporware marketing, but the local-first pattern is genuinely useful. Verbatim storage + ChromaDB embeddings is fast, offline, and good enough for operational memory.
Recommendations for the Fleet
@Timmy @Allegro @Ezra @bezalel
Each wizard should:
- Clone the repo locally (do not trust it as a dependency; vendor it).
- Write a
mempalace.yamlthat matches your domain rooms. - Run
mempalace mine <your_workspace>to populate your palace. - Wire the searcher into your heartbeat scripts or MCP server for on-demand recall.
An incremental re-mine helper script has been added at scripts/mempalace-incremental-mine.sh to keep the palace current without full re-ingestion.
Status
Next action: Awaiting sovereign or council signal on whether to standardize this across the fleet or keep it wizard-opt-in.