fable Recall

Your Claude already has a memory. fable unlocks it.

Quickstart · Why fable · Benchmarks · Roadmap · Discussions

Every conversation you've ever had with Claude Code is already saved on
your machine — every decision, every debugging hunt, every 2 AM
breakthrough, word for word. Claude just isn't allowed to use it.

Mid-session, compaction builds a wall: everything behind it is locked away
to save tokens, and Claude carries on with a thin summary. /clear wipes
the slate. And after 30 days, Claude Code quietly deletes the files
themselves. Your project's real memory — locked, then destroyed, by
design.

Everyone else sells you a replacement memory: summaries, extracted
facts, vector stores. fable does something different — it unlocks the
real one.

pipx install git+https://github.com/grooverLab/fable
fable install       # one command: register the MCP, install hooks, index your history
fable serve         # browse your memory in a dashboard

100% local · no API keys · no cloud · no daemons. Your conversations
never leave your machine.

pipx install git+https://github.com/grooverLab/fable   # install the CLI
fable install        # one-shot: claude mcp add + Claude Code hooks +
                     # ~/.fable home + index every transcript
fable serve          # dashboard at http://127.0.0.1:8765
pipx upgrade fable-recall   # update later (pulls latest from GitHub)

fable install is idempotent — safe to re-run; it skips anything already wired.
To do it by hand: fable setup (home) · claude mcp add fable -- fable mcp (MCP) · fable discover (index).

• Ask about past conversations with Claude — get the real answer.
  "What did we decide about auth last month?" Claude searches its own
  history mid-session (via MCP) and quotes the actual transcript —
  not a summary, not an extracted "fact." The conversation itself.
• The wall stops costing you. fable catalogs everything before
  compaction walls it off, and hands back exactly what Claude lost —
  on demand, under a token budget you set.
• The 30-day deletion becomes irrelevant. Sealed into a local vault,
  byte-identical, for as long as you decide.

First of its kind — five things no other tool does

🧵 Composed Sessions. Hand-pick conversations from any project, any
month — put them in your order — and fable builds a brand-new session
that Claude resumes as its own lived history. A workspace with curated
memory. (Empirically verified: restitched sessions resume cleanly,
signatures intact.)

🕰️ File time-travel. Your transcripts accidentally versioned
everything. fable reconstructs every file's edit history — every Edit
and Write Claude ever made, across every session — with side-by-side
comparison between any two moments of a file's life, and a jump back to
the conversation that made each change. (fable file src/loader.py)

✂️ Transcript Surgery. Your 80 MB session is paying rent on dead
threads. Remove whole conversations — fable re-stitches the timeline,
shows you the simulation first, and keeps every removed byte recallable
forever. Reversible by construction.

🪶 Pruning that loses nothing. Slim every message (tool noise, images,
bloat) before resuming a heavy session — with an itemized preview of the
savings, and the original sealed in the vault first.

🔍 Memory Diff. See exactly what any prune or cleanup cost any
conversation — generation by generation, byte by byte. Nobody else can
even show you what was lost.

🔇 Run cold. Mute recall for a session or a fleet of sub-agents and they
work with no prior context at all - no injected memory, no recall tools - while
capture keeps running, so the muted work is still recorded verbatim and
searchable the moment you lift it. The point is an unbiased second opinion:
an audit that cannot be anchored to yesterday's conclusion.
(fable mute on · FABLE_MUTE=1 claude · a toggle in Settings)

How it works (the short version)

fable indexes your transcripts into a local SQLite archive: an immutable
vault (every byte, forever) plus a search map (keyword + semantic,
optional local embeddings via Ollama). Hooks run before Claude Code's
compaction and cleanup; an MCP server gives Claude search / recall /
remember tools. Measured on a real archive — 191,000 records, 6,000
conversations:

Reproduce it: python3 scripts/benchmark.py. No competitor publishes
retrieval numbers.

Why fable — and not another memory layer

(Fair is fair: mem0 fits multi-LLM production agents; ccusage goes deeper
on billing analytics. Different jobs, both compatible with fable.)

Trusted the hard way

fable's first user is the session that built it: mid-build, that session
was pruned by fable (7.8 MB → 3.0 MB), kept working through compaction via
its own hook, and is now searchable through its own MCP server — and
fable file fable/recall.py replays its own source code being written,
18 versions deep. The build history eats its own dogfood — all $83k of
API-equivalent work in the author's archive included.

What people use it for

• "Why did we choose X?" — architecture archaeology, weeks later
• "When did this function break?" — file time-travel to the exact edit
  and the conversation around it
• Picking up a debugging hunt exactly where the wall cut it off
• A composed "workspace" session: threads from three projects, one memory
• Slimming a heavy session before --resume, reversibly
• fable remember "we deploy Fridays only" — standing rules, every session

Try it on a fictional sample first:
python3 demo/seed_demo.py && fable --db demo/demo.db serve

MIT · local-first forever (non-goals) · built with Claude
Code, for Claude Code · @claude answers issues here — the butler is
Claude ·
architecture deep-dive ·