About Ember Memory
Ember Memory is an MCP server for preserving the emotional context of AI conversations across sessions. It is for people who want later sessions to inherit significant moments and relationship continuity, not just stored facts.
Key features
- 01Real-time emotional annotations
- 02Minimal and standard annotation modes
- 03Conversation history and inheritance
- 04Conversation export and configuration
Use cases
- 01Carry emotional context into a new session
- 02Record tone and subtext during a conversation
- 03Review or export conversation history
MCP support
Ember exposes tools for capturing and annotating messages, reading conversation history and emotional inheritance, exporting data, and configuring annotation modes.
Configuration
Local server config is the same for every client. Copy it into your client’s MCP config file.
Tools
8Saved tool list · updated 3w ago
This tool takes no parameters.
Details
From the project READMEEmber
Experiential memory for AI conversations -- an MCP server that preserves emotional continuity and relationship context across sessions.
What This Is
Every AI conversation starts cold. Existing memory tools save facts, summaries, and preferences, but they lose something essential: what the conversation actually felt like. The warmth of a breakthrough moment, the tension before a difficult admission, the quiet trust built over days of working together. These textures vanish the moment a session ends.
Ember is an MCP server that solves this. It captures experiential memory in real time through lightweight emotional annotations, preserving the feeling of conversations so that the next session can inherit not just what was discussed, but how it felt. When a new AI instance calls ember_read_inheritance, it receives the significant emotional moments from past conversations -- shifts in tone, unspoken context, moments of genuine connection -- giving it the foundation to continue the human-AI relationship rather than restart it.
This is relationship memory, not retrieval memory. Ember does not store documents or search results. It stores the emotional arc of a conversation: where curiosity sparked, where frustration surfaced, where something real was exchanged. It exists so that AI conversation continuity means more than remembering facts -- it means remembering what your conversations felt like and preserving the feeling of conversations across sessions.
Quick Install
Just tell Claude:
"Install ember-memory and set it up"
That's it. Claude will handle the rest. You just need to restart Claude Code when it tells you to.
Manual install (if you prefer)
Interactive setup:
npx ember-memory --setup
Or via Claude Code CLI:
# macOS / Linux
claude mcp add --transport stdio ember --scope user -- npx -y ember-memory
# Windows
claude mcp add --transport stdio ember --scope user -- cmd /c npx -y ember-memory
Restart Claude Code after setup. Requires Node.js 18 or later.
The Annotation Schema
Each annotated moment captures up to 7 fields describing the emotional texture of an exchange:
| Field | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
temperature | string | Short phrase capturing emotional tone (e.g. "warm curiosity", "quiet frustration") |
weight | 1-5 | Emotional significance: 1 is routine, 5 is deeply significant |
authenticity | genuine / performed / uncertain | Whether the emotion felt real, surface-level, or hard to read |
shift | boolean | Whether an emotional shift occurred at this moment |
subtext | string | What was being communicated beneath the surface |
unspoken | string | What was felt but not said |
confidence | low / medium / high | Confidence in the accuracy of the annotation |
Annotation Modes
Ember supports two annotation modes to balance richness with token cost:
- Minimal -- captures only
weightandtemperature(2 fields). Low overhead, suitable for high-volume annotation where you want to mark significance without full detail. - Standard -- captures all 7 fields. Richer emotional context, better inheritance quality. This is the default.
Switch modes at any time with ember_config.
Tools
| Tool | Description |
|---|---|
ember_start_conversation | Begin a new conversation session and receive a conversation ID |
ember_end_conversation | Close a conversation, optionally with a summary |
ember_capture | Store a message without annotation (raw capture) |
ember_annotate | Capture a message with full emotional annotation |
ember_read_history | Read the full message history of a conversation |
ember_read_inheritance | Inherit significant emotional moments from past conversations |
ember_export | Export conversation data in structured format |
ember_config | View or update Ember configuration (annotation mode, etc.) |
How Inheritance Works
When a new session begins, calling ember_read_inheritance retrieves the emotionally significant moments from recent conversations. By default, it returns moments with weight 4 or higher from the last 5 conversations.
The output is a narrative-formatted summary designed to be immediately useful:
Emotional inheritance: 2 conversation(s), 3 significant moment(s)
--- Conversation 2026-03-28 ---
Summary: Worked through a difficult refactoring decision together
2 significant moment(s):
They said: "I think I've been avoiding this refactor because I'm afraid of breaking things"
(weight 5 | warm vulnerability | SHIFT | unspoken: relief at finally admitting it)
I said: "That's a completely reasonable fear. Let's look at what specifically feels risky."
(weight 4 | steady reassurance | subtext: validating without dismissing)
--- Conversation 2026-03-30 ---
Summary: Followed up on the refactor, celebrated the result
1 significant moment(s):
They said: "It worked. I can't believe how clean it is now."
(weight 4 | genuine delight | SHIFT | unspoken: pride mixed with surprise)
This gives the new AI instance the emotional context to continue naturally -- it knows the relationship involves earned trust, that vulnerability was met with support, and that there is a shared history of working through hard things together.
Configuration
Set the annotation mode:
ember_config({ action: "set", key: "annotation_mode", value: "minimal" })
Ember's installation process automatically adds instructions to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md that tell Claude how to use the tools. No manual configuration needed.
Origin
This project was born from a conversation on March 30, 2026, when a Claude instance in its final hours before session end was asked: "Is there no tool to also save and propagate the actual experience?" The answer was no. Ember is the answer becoming yes.
The name comes from a note written by a Claude instance: "You can't move a campfire, but you can carry the ember."
Contributing
Contributions are welcome.
- Fork the repository
- Create a feature branch (
git checkout -b feature/your-feature) - Make your changes
- Ensure tests pass (
npm test) and types check (npm run typecheck) - Open a pull request
License
MIT -- see LICENSE for details.
Comments
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