Long-term memory providers

Memory Spaces hold dsh-mnemon's long-term memory, and their backend is a Provider you can swap. The Memory Space contract stays stable while the Provider supplies the data plane. Mnemon Native is the official, prioritized default; external Providers are opt-in integrations for teams that already use another memory engine or need a different sharing, extraction or retrieval model.

Only Mnemon Native needs the Mnemon CLI. When the CLI is missing, another ready Provider can serve Memory Spaces, and a saved Provider choice is still honored.

Each adapter is an independently published dsh-mnemon-provider-* package, installed as a child of the Memory Spaces Source. The Starter includes all nine packages, but external services remain disabled until configured. No external backend server or CLI is bundled. See the official package list and Provider author contract.

#Provider matrix

The Host exposes only capabilities an adapter can honor. UI actions and Agent tools do not fabricate missing graph, related, link, browse, or deletion behavior.

#Service and Memory Space fields

Memory providers, on Memory Spaces' page (open Plugins → dsh-mnemon and select Memory Spaces), owns reusable provider service configuration. Enabling or saving a provider performs authoritative discovery and synchronizes every visible provider-native namespace into the Memory Space directory—for example banks, projects, workspaces, users, or container tags. Provider titles and descriptions become the local routing metadata. Memory Spaces → Overview controls DSH activation and shows the synchronized instance scope. The Host merges both layers immediately before calling an adapter. Secrets stay in <storageRoot>/state/memory-providers.json with mode 0600; the WebUI represents configured secrets only as a mask, and entering a new value replaces the saved secret.

DSH workspace mode does not rewrite every provider namespace. Mnemon Native follows the workspace automatically. Holographic and ByteRover default to workspace-local paths but allow explicit path overrides. Remote providers continue to use the URI, workspace, user, bank, project, or container configured on the Memory Space; switching DSH workspaces never rewrites those identities implicitly.

#Manual and smart placement

Manual placement preserves the existing workflow: create a Memory Space, choose one engine, configure it, and continue to use the same Recall, Content, Entities, and Remember surfaces.

Smart placement builds an allowlist from the candidates selected by the user:

1. The Host enforces data boundary and required-capability rules.
2. If one eligible provider remains, rules select it deterministically.
3. If several remain, an independent task Agent considers the routing description, soft preference, and user-authored strategy prompt.
4. The Host validates the returned provider against the eligible set and persists the decision, reason, confidence, and candidate IDs.

Connection secrets never enter the selector prompt. local-only excludes every remote provider before model selection. Mnemon Native stays a local candidate while its CLI is available.

#Operational boundaries

• OpenViking writes a new .md file with content/write, mode: "create", wait: true, and source/category tags. Categories map to preferences, experiences (insight/decision), events (context), or entities (fact/general). A stored receipt requires matching URI, byte count, completed vector indexing and exact public full-content readback; semantic processing may be skipped for memory files. Recall and browse read full content rather than treating summaries as the stored original. Session extraction and LLM curation are no longer used for these writes.
• OpenViking requires a server supporting that content API; the published v0.4.20 backend is covered by the optional integration test. By default, discovery uses the Admin API; configure account and a key allowed to enumerate its users. For a user key without admin access, set User key owner (skip admin) (discoveryUser) alongside endpoint, apiKey, and account. This explicitly selects viking://user/<discoveryUser>/memories, validates it with read-only GET /api/v1/fs/ls, and synchronizes one space. It omits account/user identity headers because the server resolves them from the key; account names the local projection and cannot override the key's tenant. Obtain these identifiers from the service administrator. Missing roots, denied access and invalid responses reject the save without replacing existing configuration. No health-only or automatic admin-error fallback is used. Cloud service availability and write permission require separate validation; no live cloud account is certified by the deterministic tests. See upstream authentication and managed-service quick start.
• Existing explicit viking://user/<user>/memories roots remain valid. Legacy viking://user/memories resolves using the configured user, or the authenticated system-status identity when omitted. User-key discovery uses its explicit owner and rejects mismatched memory owners. Unsafe path components and deletion outside the selected user root are rejected. The registry format is unchanged; before downgrading, clear discoveryUser with the current version and use an admin-capable setup, or disable the service and restore a compatible configuration. Remote memories remain untouched.
• OpenViking errors, incomplete indexing and timeouts never produce a committed receipt. A write may already exist remotely; its error includes the requested URI for inspection before retrying. There is no automatic extraction fallback or retry. A verified receipt carries the exact file id, allowing the Host to compensate a later failed local archive by deleting only its new index. Unknown remote write outcomes remain for inspection. Upgrading or rolling back the adapter does not delete existing remote files; a downgrade restores the older write behavior.
• The WebUI never calls external services or local CLIs directly. Provider I/O stays in the Host with cancellation, timeouts, bounded process output, and shell-disabled argument arrays.
• Disabling a provider removes all of its local Memory Space mappings, activation state, and mapped title/description metadata. Re-enabling discovers them again from the provider. Reconciliation never deletes provider-owned data; per-memory Forget remains a separate capability-controlled action.
• Holographic is a TypeScript adaptation of local structured-fact semantics, using an atomic JSON store and an independent data format and lifecycle implementation.
• Hindsight uses a lightweight liveness probe and reads real statistics, entities, and relationships from the provider's bank stats, entity catalog, and graph responses. Recall and graph remain usable against older deployments that lack the newer statistics surfaces.
• ByteRover exposes focused status, query, and curate operations. Broad knowledge-tree browsing and deletion are intentionally not invented.
• Supermemory browse results merge extracted memory entries with still-browseable ingested documents and deduplicate by provider ID, so documents do not disappear from Content while extraction is incomplete.
• Mnemon Native records use. A recall by an Agent, by /mnemon recall or by Ask Agent adds a row with its query to the store's operation log (mnemon log, which keeps the latest 5,000 operations) and counts the memories it returns as accessed, which Mnemon's retention takes into account (mnemon gc never suggests a memory accessed three times). The Memory System's own searches (Direct search on Memory Spaces and Find related memories on the Entities page) read a snapshot instead, with mnemon --readonly, as its lists and graph already do, and change nothing. The Host's checks of its own writes while archiving read the live store, since a snapshot need not match a store another process is writing.
• Mnemon Packs include Mnemon Native Memory Spaces, Runtime, and Documents. External connections, credentials, local third-party stores, and remote provider data are excluded.
• Availability, pricing, privacy, retention, and licensing of external products are governed by their respective operators. Review those boundaries before sending private memory to a remote provider.

See Third-party notices for source attribution and licensing boundaries.