Memory for Claude Code and Codex

First principles thinking for your AI agents.

Aura Distill turns what you teach your agents into a small, ordered set of principles. Each one keeps its reason, its origin and how sure it is. It all lives on your machine, in plain files you own.

Install Read the source

Plate no. 000000, drawn for you

Plate I · Proportion

Facts fade. Principles hold.

Correct an agent about a long PR description, then a long commit body, then a long code comment. A fact store keeps three facts. Aura Distill keeps one principle: say it short, everywhere.

The next time a new kind of text comes up, the agent knows what you want. In our benchmark, only Aura Distill named that pattern on fresh questions, in 4 of 4 trials.

Plate V · Pulse

Why not the built-in memory

Claude Code's auto memory keeps notes per repository. That works for facts inside one repo. Aura Distill keeps principles across every repository and every agent tool, under an integrity contract you can audit.

Benchmark LTR-1, October 2026. One synthetic user teaches each system over six sessions; fresh sessions then probe what stuck.
	Built-in memory	Aura Distill
Probe trials answered right	38 of 52	50 of 52
Team directive carried into another repo	0 of 4	4 of 4
Works from Codex	no	4 of 4
False memories stored	0	0
Learning cost, six sessions	$0.83	$3.05
Context loaded at every start	16.8k tokens	19.0k tokens

Aura Distill costs more to learn, so we show that too. The sample is small: four trials per probe. One earlier claim did not survive blind review and was withdrawn.

Running both? We tested that as well. With auto memory on next to Aura Distill nothing improved, every session started about 800 tokens heavier, and the two stores disagreed until the next distill. So the installer turns auto memory off.

The index at work

Four words in. The right context out.

sam>

Sam is the synthetic user from our benchmark; the store is an illustrative sample. The index opens the six principles that apply and leaves the rest closed. A one-off request and a private matter stay out.

Plate IV · Resonance

The integrity contract

Memory you cannot audit is a liability. Every entry in Aura Distill follows these rules.

Plate VI · Practice

Constant work

Every commit on main, one cell per day.

Plate III · Ensō

Make them yours.

curl -sL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tomacco/aura-distill/main/install.sh | bash

Then work as usual, and run /distill at the end of a session. No sudo. Knowledge lives in ~/.aura-distill/ as plain markdown. Read install.sh before you run it.

With love from Barcelona Ivan · tomac.co

& Claude Built with Ivan, one pull request at a time.