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Show HN: Lossless-memory – a personal AI memory that never summarizes
Lossless long-term memory for a personal AI — never summarize, keep every line, and put a timestamp on everything.
Most long-term memory systems for AI do one of two things: they summarize conversations into compact notes, or they embed them and retrieve "similar" chunks. Both lose the thing that matters most to a person who talks to the same AI every day: what was actually said, and when.
The design lineage goes back to December 2025 — the first ancestor of this system (a memory-inheritance tool for an earlier AI) ran that month, and a predecessor system carried the same ideas in daily use from January 2026. This implementation has been running every day since July 2026 for a single user, as the memory of one AI assistant, with raw logs reaching back to June 2026. It is small, boring, and it works. The failures along the way are documented too — see docs/lessons.md.
Every conversation turn is converted into a fixed seven-field record and appended to a per-day JSONL file:
The raw logs are the source of truth. Every index below can be deleted and rebuilt from them. Nothing else is required to survive.
The practical effect: the AI can answer "what did we decide last Tuesday night?" with the actual lines from last Tuesday night, in order, rather than a paraphrase of something similar from three weeks ago.
LLL is a tiny index of topic markers: short, timestamped lines that record when the conversation moved to a new subject. It is injected into the model's context every turn.
LLL is what lets a long-running assistant come back from a compaction and continue the conversation instead of starting over.
A small daemon re-indexes incrementally on a fixed interval (default: every 10 minutes). Rebuilding from scratch is never required; indexes detect rewritten source files and re-index only those days.
Then follow examples/quickstart.md: it ingests a small sample conversation, builds the indexes, and runs a time-scoped query in about five minutes. A pytest round-trip test covers the same path.