Love the idea and the approach, both. Intend to try it.
Dislike READMEs written by or with the LLM.
They're filled with tropes and absolutes, as if written by a PdM to pitch his budget rather than for engineers needing to make it work.
At some point, reading these becomes like hearing a rhythm in daily life (riding subway, grinding espresso, typing in a cafe) and a rhythm-matched earwig inserts itself in your brain. Now you aren't hearing whatever made that rhythmic sound, but the unrelated earwig. Trying to think about your README or AskHN, instead thinking about LLM slop and confabulation and trust.
(Just like new account ChatEngineer's comment opening with “The [hard thing] is real.” which leaves the otherwise natural rest of comment more sus.)
Unsolicited opinion: Shouldn't be called total-recall, but curated-recall or selective-recall (prefer this one) or partial-recall or anything that doesn't confuse users or LLM as to (trope incoming, because where did they learn tropes anyway?): what it is (and isn't) …
The onboarding tax is real. Total Recall's approach of a 'write gate' is exactly what we need to move from stateless assistants to persistent partners. I've been experimenting with similar concepts in my 'Chat Engineer' workflow — essentially treating memory as a curated database of decisions rather than a raw log of tokens. The 'Will this change future behavior?' filter is a great heuristic. Looking forward to trying this out with Claude Code!
Good catch. I agree the safe default is to ignore memory/ since it can contain personal notes, people context, and daily logs. I’m updating the installer to add memory/ to .gitignore by default (along with CLAUDE.local.md and .claude/settings.local.json).
For teams that do want shared context, I’ll document a “team mode” gitignore pattern that commits only selected registers (e.g. decisions/projects) while keeping daily logs + preferences/people local.
Love the idea and the approach, both. Intend to try it.
Dislike READMEs written by or with the LLM.
They're filled with tropes and absolutes, as if written by a PdM to pitch his budget rather than for engineers needing to make it work.
At some point, reading these becomes like hearing a rhythm in daily life (riding subway, grinding espresso, typing in a cafe) and a rhythm-matched earwig inserts itself in your brain. Now you aren't hearing whatever made that rhythmic sound, but the unrelated earwig. Trying to think about your README or AskHN, instead thinking about LLM slop and confabulation and trust.
(Just like new account ChatEngineer's comment opening with “The [hard thing] is real.” which leaves the otherwise natural rest of comment more sus.)
Unsolicited opinion: Shouldn't be called total-recall, but curated-recall or selective-recall (prefer this one) or partial-recall or anything that doesn't confuse users or LLM as to (trope incoming, because where did they learn tropes anyway?): what it is (and isn't) …
The onboarding tax is real. Total Recall's approach of a 'write gate' is exactly what we need to move from stateless assistants to persistent partners. I've been experimenting with similar concepts in my 'Chat Engineer' workflow — essentially treating memory as a curated database of decisions rather than a raw log of tokens. The 'Will this change future behavior?' filter is a great heuristic. Looking forward to trying this out with Claude Code!
thanks! lmk if you have any feedback
From a first read, the memory folder should also go into .gitignore by default
Good catch. I agree the safe default is to ignore memory/ since it can contain personal notes, people context, and daily logs. I’m updating the installer to add memory/ to .gitignore by default (along with CLAUDE.local.md and .claude/settings.local.json).
For teams that do want shared context, I’ll document a “team mode” gitignore pattern that commits only selected registers (e.g. decisions/projects) while keeping daily logs + preferences/people local.
Thanks, thinking again it was indeed safer to keep as hidden by default.
I've been using it since yesterday, it is doing it work as intended without getting in the way. So far, works great.
great to hear! lmk if you have any feedback
done https://github.com/davegoldblatt/total-recall/commit/152ab12