It was a Saturday afternoon in early April. I had just finished another conversation with an AI agent that had completely forgotten who I was. We'd spent two hours debugging a Python script the day before. Now it was asking me what programming language I preferred. Again.
I did what any reasonable person would do: I went looking for a memory system. The options were... not great. Everything wanted my data in their cloud. Everything wanted a subscription. Everything wanted me to trust that their API would still exist next month. I kept thinking: this is just a database. Why does it need to be a service?
The SQLite decision
I chose SQLite for the same reason you choose a hammer when you need to hit a nail. It's boring, it's reliable, and it works everywhere. No server process. No network latency. No API keys to rotate. Just a file on disk that you own outright.
The first version was embarrassingly simple. A single table. A few helper functions. Store a memory, retrieve a memory, done. I called it Mnemosyne because Greek mythology has the best names for memory things, and because "Yet Another Vector DB" sounded worse.
The first 24 hours
I started coding around 3 PM. By 6 PM I had basic CRUD working. By 9 PM I had a simple CLI that could store and search memories. By midnight I was integrating it with Hermes Agent, watching it actually remember things across sessions. I didn't sleep much that night.
The commit message for that first push was almost too honest: "Zero-dependency AI memory system." No marketing fluff. No grand vision. Just: here's a thing that remembers stuff, and it doesn't need the internet to work.
Why this matters
I didn't set out to build a product. I set out to solve a problem that was driving me insane. The fact that other people have the same problem is why you're reading this now. But the core principle hasn't changed: your AI's memory should live on your machine, not someone else's server.
The next few weeks would get a lot more complicated. But that first day, that first commit, that simple SQLite file... that was the moment it all started. And it started with a very simple belief: remembering things shouldn't be this hard.