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Cortex

Cortex is a self-hosted platform for autonomous episodic memory, project governance, and a code knowledge graph built for AI coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, Cline, Windsurf, OpenCode) and development teams.

It combines Zero-CGO static AST extraction, community clustering, blast-radius analysis, project governance, hybrid retrieval (BM25 + vectors), and secure persistence backed by local SQLite or a single-tenant self-hosted PostgreSQL server.

Capabilities

Code and knowledge graph

  • Polyglot AST extractor (Zero-CGO): analyzes .NET, Java/Kotlin, Rust, C/C++, PHP, Ruby, Swift, Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, Python, and SQL in pure Go, without sending code to external LLMs.
  • Community detection and god nodes: groups functional subsystems, labels architectural hubs, and reports dependency cycles (Tarjan SCC).
  • Blast radius: measures the impact of changing any component and lists the affected files and functions.
  • Obsidian export: writes an interconnected Markdown vault with [[WikiLinks]].

Episodic memory and continuous learning

  • Records architecture decisions, bug fixes, patterns, and technical discoveries.
  • Hybrid retrieval: combines full-text BM25 with vector similarity (OpenAI, Ollama, pgvector, Qdrant) and freshness/importance weighting.
  • Autonomous background workers: periodic graph reorganization, contradiction detection, and conflict resolution (supersedes).

Governance and self-hosting

  • Single-tenant PostgreSQL with forced RLS: tenant and workspace identifiers are configuration constants, never client input.
  • Project rules and system prompts: dynamic injection of corporate rules and agent skills into every query.

Installation

# Homebrew (macOS / Linux)
brew install lleontor705/tap/cortex

# Go toolchain
go install github.com/lleontor705/cortex/v2/cmd/cortex@latest

# From source
git clone https://github.com/lleontor705/cortex.git
cd cortex
make build

Prebuilt binaries for Windows, macOS, and Linux are available on the GitHub Releases page.

Quick start

# Wire agent integrations with modular profiles (dev, minimal, agent)
cortex setup claude-code --profile=dev
cortex setup opencode --profile=agent

# Inspect the operating mode and run diagnostics
cortex status
cortex doctor

# Adaptive search with complexity classification
cortex search "architecture decision" --mode=auto

# Index a repository once, then keep it fresh with the watcher
cortex ingest ./internal --project cortex
cortex watch . --project cortex

# Interactive terminal UI
cortex tui

Server mode (embedded web UI served from the same binary and port as the HTTP API):

cortex serve

Documentation