cede

Fork this. Build your own agent with embedded memory graphs.

cede is a forkable starter kit built on top of cortex-embedded — an embedded memory graph engine for AI agents. Fork this repo, shape the soul, add your own tools, and ship an agent whose entire memory lives in a single SQLite-backed graph.

Want omnichannel? See omni-cede — a fork of cede that adds an HTTP API, identity resolution, and per-channel session management.

Ecosystem

cortex-embedded          <-- embedded memory graph engine (upstream)
  |-- cede               <-- you are here (fork this to build your own agent)
       |-- omni-cede     <-- omnichannel variant (HTTP API, identity, sessions)

What You Get

Everything from cortex-embedded, packaged as a ready-to-run agent with an embedded memory graph:

• Embedded memory graph — 18 node kinds, 6 edge kinds, full provenance tracking
• Graph-native chat sessions — fresh HNSW-based briefing per turn, no growing message history
• Hybrid recall — semantic search + graph traversal + recency window (last 7 messages always included)
• Local embeddings — BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5 via fastembed (384-dim, no API calls)
• Auto-linking + contradiction detection — three-tier: cosine -> negation keywords -> LLM adjudication
• Importance decay + trust propagation — the agent's beliefs strengthen or weaken over time
• Context compaction — LLM extracts key facts from long conversations
• LLM backends — Anthropic Claude or Ollama (local)
• Tool registry — add custom tools that write results into the graph with provenance
• Sub-agents — delegate tasks to scoped sub-agents in the shared graph
• TUI graph explorer — interactive terminal UI with chat, node inspection, visualization
• CLI — chat, ask, memory search, soul/identity management, graph visualization, diagnostics

Quick Start

# Clone your fork
git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/cede.git
cd cede

# Build
cargo build --release

# Initialize database and download embedding model
cede init

# Start chatting (pick one LLM backend)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-... cede chat
cede --ollama llama3 chat

# Single query
cede ask "What do you know?"

# Interactive graph explorer
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-... cede graph explore

# Graph overview
cede graph overview

# Memory operations
cede memory stats
cede memory search "topic"
cede memory show <node_id>

# Identity
cede soul show

# Diagnostics
cede doctor
cede consolidate

How to Make It Yours

1. Shape the Soul

Edit the seed identity in src/lib.rs — the seed_identity() function creates the initial Soul node. Change the body text to define who your agent is.

2. Add Custom Tools

Register tools in src/tools/mod.rs. Each tool is a function that takes parameters and returns a ToolResult. Tool calls are automatically tracked as ToolCall nodes in the graph.

3. Tune the Config

Adjust src/config.rs defaults:

Parameter	Default	What it does
session_recency_window	7	Recent messages always included in briefing
auto_link_cosine_threshold	0.75	Minimum similarity for auto-linking
contradiction_cosine_threshold	0.85	Trigger contradiction detection
compaction_threshold	20	Messages before context compaction
max_iterations	10	Agent loop iteration limit
decay_interval_secs	60	Background decay sweep frequency

4. Staying Updated

cede tracks cortex-embedded as the upstream remote. To pull engine improvements:

git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master

Architecture

+-----------------------------------------+
|                  cede                    |
+---------+----------+---------+----------+
|  recall | briefing |  tools  |  agent   |
| (HNSW + | (scored  | (custom | (loop +  |
|  graph) |  context)|  + std) | subagent)|
+---------+----------+---------+----------+
|            graph + memory               |
|       (BFS, scoring, decay)             |
+---------+-------------------------------+
|  HNSW   |         SQLite                |
| (2-tier)|  (WAL, bundled rusqlite)      |
+---------+-------------------------------+
|            fastembed                     |
|      (BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5)           |
+-----------------------------------------+

Tests

# Run all 28 tests
cargo test -- --test-threads=1

Dependencies

Crate	Purpose
rusqlite (bundled)	SQLite with WAL mode
instant-distance	HNSW approximate nearest neighbor
fastembed	Local text embeddings (ONNX)
tokio	Async runtime
reqwest	HTTP client for Anthropic
clap	CLI argument parsing
ratatui + crossterm	TUI graph explorer
async-channel	Background task channels

License

MIT