deja-vu: memory built from your coding agents’ session history

Three months ago you and Claude Code spent an afternoon fixing a JWT refresh bug. Today the same bug shows up in Codex, and it knows nothing about it. Yet the full transcript of that session is sitting on your disk. deja-vu indexes those existing session files, so months of history are searchable the day you install it, and any agent can use MCP to find what another agent concluded.

What it does

• One MCP tool: the server exposes a single deja tool with a mode argument; recall, for example, returns matching snippets (capped at 4 KB) for a question or an exact error string. The project measures its definition at about 477 tokens.
• Shared across agents: it supports 38 harnesses, including Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, opencode and Gemini CLI. A fix found in one comes back in the others.
• Auto-recall: when enabled, relevant history arrives at session start, before a file edit and after a failed command, without the agent having to ask.
• Indexes the work: alongside the conversation it records the files each turn opened and the commands with their exit codes. deja promote <id> --state rejected marks a decision that was later reverted.
• Local and redacted: no model, no embeddings, no server. Keys, tokens and JWTs become [redacted:<kind>] as the index is built.

Who it’s for

• Developers who switch between several coding agents and keep hitting the same problem in each.
• Heavy users who lose commands and decisions to context compaction and want them back.

Setup

On macOS and Linux it’s two commands; the second wires MCP into every agent it detects and builds the first index:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vshulcz/deja-vu/main/install.sh | sh
deja install --auto

Alternatives: brew install deja-vu, or on Windows scoop install deja-vu or winget install vshulcz.deja-vu.

Our take

About 1,100 stars as of 2026-10-06, created in July 2026 and updated constantly. What sets it apart from other memory servers is that it doesn’t start empty: the data is the session history you already have, searched lexically by one Go binary, at zero token cost. It’s built for coding work, not for remembering personal preferences in a chat assistant. Two cautions. deja install rewrites global guidance files for several agents (opt out with --no-guidance), so check what it will touch first. And redaction applies to the index only; secrets remain in the original transcripts, which deja secrets helps you find. Licensed MIT.