Hindsight Coding Agent

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Hindsight Coding-Agent Memory

This machine runs the hindsight-coding-agents plugin: long-term project memory for coding sessions, backed by a Hindsight server. You (the agent) are already wired into it — this skill explains what happens automatically, which tools you have, and how to configure or debug it.

What happens automatically (no action needed)

• Per-repo memory bank: each repository resolves to a bank (shown in the session banner: ↳ memory bank “coding-agent::<repo>”). Worktrees share the main repo's bank.
• Ingestion builds itself: on first open, the bank is seeded from recent commit messages and a read-only codebase survey; every session start, a background engine tops it up (new commits, new conversations) and keeps 5 knowledge pages current. There is NO ingest command to run.
• Session synthesis: by default, the first prompt of a session triggers one deep memory synthesis (reflect) injected into context. autoInject switches the source: pages (knowledge page search hits), recall (recalled observations), or none (nothing injected; the agent searches the knowledge pages first and reflects only when they are too shallow).
• Write-back: the session transcript is retained into the bank automatically at session end (per-turn on opencode). The user never needs to "save" a conversation.

Storing things deliberately

When the user says "store this in hindsight" / "remember this":

• The current conversation is captured automatically at session end — say so; no tool needed.
• An external document, notes, or durable findings → hindsight_ingest_document(title, content).
• A new feature/initiative being started → hindsight_capture_initiative(title, summary), right after the plan is agreed and before code is written.
• A plan that materially changed (goal, scope, or rationale — including mid-implementation) → call hindsight_capture_initiative again with relates_to_page_id set to that initiative's page id, summarising the current intent. Same page, updated plan — never a second page. Trivial course-corrections don't count.

Retrieving

• hindsight_search_knowledge_pages(query) — FIRST STOP for project questions (components, conventions, past decisions, initiatives). Server-side hybrid search, fast.
• hindsight_read_knowledge_page(page_id) / hindsight_list_knowledge_pages — read pages fully.
• hindsight_reflect(query) — deep reasoning over the whole memory for WHY questions and exact decided values; slower (seconds), use deliberately.
• Credit visibly whenever memory informs an answer: start that part with 🧠 From Hindsight memory (<page>): … — and never credit memory that didn't contribute.

Correcting wrong or stale memory

If you verify that something Hindsight served is wrong or outdated (the code, git, or an external source contradicts it), FIX THE RECORD — don't just ignore it. Call hindsight_ingest_document with:

• title: Correction: <topic> (e.g. Correction: retry policy 4xx set)
• content: (1) what memory claimed, (2) what is verifiably true now, (3) the evidence you checked (file/commit/output). Quote exact values verbatim.

Newer facts supersede older ones in retrieval, so one clear correction permanently outranks the stale memory. Do this whenever you catch a wrong injected memory, a stale knowledge-page claim, or an outdated decision — silent disregard leaves the trap armed for the next session.

Install / update

npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents install all          # every detected agent, wired natively
npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents install claude-code  # or just one
npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents uninstall all        # removes exactly what install added
npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents update               # refresh the runtime only, no rewiring
npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents stats                # how often each agent uses Hindsight

install takes an explicit target — all, or one or more harness names. A bare npx @vectorize-io/hindsight-coding-agents install changes nothing and prints the choice, so wiring every agent on the machine is never something that happens by accident. Updating is the same install command again — it re-copies the runtime in place.

Day to day you should not have to: once a day, a session start checks npm and re-stages a newer runtime in the background (autoUpdate, on by default — set it to false to pin the version you have). That is the update command above, which refreshes the copy every wired agent already points at and deliberately touches no host config; re-run install yourself after a release that adds a new hook, or to wire another agent.

Local daemon settings (daemon mode)

Daemon settings keep the names the old per-agent Claude Code plugin used, so an existing environment carries over unchanged:

Any HINDSIGHT_API_* variable you export is forwarded to the daemon, so server-side settings need no equivalent here.

Configuration

Configuration is one JSON file: ~/.hindsight/coding-agent.json. Layering, later wins per field:

1. built-in defaults
2. environment variables — HINDSIGHT_API_URL, HINDSIGHT_API_TOKEN, and one per scalar setting (HINDSIGHT_<FIELD_IN_CAPS>), for containers and CI that inject config rather than write a file
3. the file's top level
4. its harnesses.<name> section — per-agent override
5. its paths.<prefix> section — per-directory override, applied after the bank is resolved (see Per-directory overrides)
6. its banks.<resolvedBankId> section — per-repo override, applied after the bank is resolved (see Per-repo opt-in/out)

Environment variables are a fallback: the file wins wherever it sets a value, so adding env to an existing setup changes nothing. The two list-valued settings, retainTags and optInPaths, take a comma-separated value (HINDSIGHT_RETAIN_TAGS="project:{gitProject},env:work"); entries are trimmed and blanks dropped. The map-valued settings (mapPathToBank, harnesses, paths, banks, retainMetadata) are file-only — per-key branching doesn't survive flattening into one variable. maxParallelRetains is available as HINDSIGHT_MAX_PARALLEL_RETAINS for containers and CI.

HINDSIGHT_CONFIG moves the file itself — point it at another path for a container or a test harness where $HOME is not the right anchor. It is still exactly one file; only its location changes. (The other variables that are not settings are HINDSIGHT_LOG_FILE, HINDSIGHT_DIAG_FILE, HINDSIGHT_USAGE_FILE and HINDSIGHT_LOG_LEVEL — see Diagnostics & logging.)

When a change takes effect

Config is read when a process starts — the file is not watched — so when an edit applies depends on what reads it:

apiToken is the exception. Every host re-reads it when the server rejects a request, so enabling authentication or rotating the key is picked up on the next call with nothing to restart — otherwise a rotation would leave a long-running agent failing every memory call until it was restarted. Everything else follows the table: apiUrl, disabled, bank routing, gitIngest, and the survey and knowledge-page settings.

hindsight_diagnose reports both sides of that gap — what the file says now, and what the running client is actually using.

Opt-in only

By default every project gets memory — that is what makes the plugin zero-setup. If you would rather nothing be remembered until you say so, turn memory off everywhere and name the projects that may use it:

{
  "optInOnly": true,
  "optInPaths": ["~/work/client-x", "~/oss"],
}

Anything outside those paths is inert: no bank is created, nothing is retained, no seed runs, and the agent behaves exactly as it would without the plugin. Approving costs nothing else — optInPaths says which projects, not which bank, so an approved repo keeps its usual coding-agent::{gitProject} name. Paths are prefixes, so approving ~/work approves every repo under it while each still gets its own bank.

A mapPathToBank entry counts as opted in too, since routing a path to a named bank already declares that project. A bare bankId does not: it names a bank rather than a project, so it cannot say which work may be remembered, and a privacy switch has to fail closed.

There is no per-repo opt-in file, for the same reason there is no repo-carried config at all: a cloned repository must not be able to turn memory on.

There is deliberately no repo-carried config file — per-repo bank routing is mapPathToBank, per-agent differences are harnesses.<name>.

Each entry point knows which harness it is (the opencode plugin is loaded by opencode, the codex hook by Codex...), so one shared config serves several agents side by side:

{
  "apiUrl": "https://api.hindsight.vectorize.io",
  "harnesses": {
    "opencode": { "reflectTimeoutMs": 60000 },
    "claude-code": { "disabled": true }, // e.g. memory off for Claude only
  },
}

Reference