A project summary might say “billing migration rolled back.” The original note says why it failed and do not retry until the idempotency fix is verified. When your next session depends on that condition, the missing sentence matters.

Fidelis stores your Markdown and text notes and retrieves their stored wording. Its default retrieval does not ask a generative model to rewrite your memory.

Try it with one note

This path supports Python 3.10+, macOS or Ubuntu, and a local Ollama service. Start Ollama if needed (ollama serve in a separate terminal). No model API key is required. The current release is 0.3.0rc1.

ollama pull nomic-embed-text
python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/fidelis
source ~/.venvs/fidelis/bin/activate
python3 -m pip install "fidelis-memory[hybrid]==0.3.0rc1"
fidelis init

demo_dir=$(mktemp -d)
cat > "$demo_dir/atlas.md" <<'NOTE'
Atlas billing migration:
Duplicate charges appeared in staging. Rolled back.
Do not retry until the idempotency fix is verified.
NOTE

fidelis watch "$demo_dir" --once
fidelis recall-hybrid "Atlas billing migration retry condition" --tier zero_llm

Look for both the rollback and the retry condition in the retrieved text. This is retrieval of a saved note, not a generated answer. For your own files, replace "$demo_dir" with a notes directory. If retrieval fails, run fidelis health and confirm Ollama has nomic-embed-text available. Keep the virtual environment after fidelis init; the background service uses it.

What this changes on your machine: fidelis init installs a per-user background service (launchd on macOS, systemd --user on Linux) that starts fidelis-server automatically at login. fidelis watch sends the note to that server, which saves it in the local store at ~/.cogito/store by default, not in the temporary demo directory. The watcher also records ingested files in ~/.fidelis/watched.json. To remove the default service on macOS, run fidelis init --uninstall; it stops the service and deletes the launchd plist only. On Linux, find the installed unit with systemctl --user list-unit-files '*fidelis-server*', then run systemctl --user disable --now <unit>, delete that unit file from ~/.config/systemd/user/, and run systemctl --user daemon-reload. Neither path deletes your data. The store is shared by everything you save with Fidelis, so deleting ~/.cogito/store erases all of it, not just the demo note; do that only on a throwaway install. Also delete the temporary demo directory ($demo_dir), and ~/.fidelis/watched.json if you want its record of the file path gone.

Connect an agent

Once the note is retrievable locally, install the MCP connection for your client:

fidelis mcp install --client codex
# Or, for Claude Code:
fidelis mcp install

Restart the client and try: “Use Fidelis to find my Atlas billing migration note. What must happen before we retry? Quote the relevant text.”

The client gets tools to recall, store, correct, fetch, and inspect memory. It decides when to call them; installing the connection does not make every turn recall automatically. Other clients and uninstall commands include Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot CLI, and OpenClaw. A separate Pi extension provides prompt-time recall.

What Fidelis preserves

• Original wording. watch, store, and other verbatim write paths keep the text you supplied, so retrieval can return the condition that a summary might omit.
• Local retrieval. Fast vector search is the default MCP recall path. Explicit hybrid search combines keyword and vector results without a generative LLM at its zero_llm tier; local embeddings still require Ollama.
• Corrections over time. A correction can supersede a prior record without erasing it. Recall can show validity and historical status instead of silently replacing the old note.

Fidelis also has optional extraction and model-assisted routes. Those can transform or filter inputs; use the verbatim path when the original wording is the point. Retrieved text can still be wrong or out of date, and your agent's model provider may see it when answering.

Current scope

Fidelis 0.3.0rc1 is a single-machine pre-release, not a hosted team memory service. The LongMemEval-S retrieval run measured whether the redesigned default path retrieved material across 470 questions; it did not measure answer accuracy. See the results, user-fit guide, and security policy for deeper detail.

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