basic-memory

Orient Claude from Basic Memory before substantial repo work by reading active tasks, open decisions, recent checkpoints, and repo conventions. Use when resuming old work or when the user asks where things stand.

Set up the Basic Memory plugin for this project — a short guided interview that configures the project mapping, seeds note schemas, learns or suggests placement conventions, and enables capture reflexes. Use when the user runs /basic-memory:bm-setup, says "set up basic memory", or asks to configure/bootstrap the plugin.

Show the Basic Memory plugin's current state for this project — active project, capture folders, output style, recent session checkpoints, and whether Basic Memory is reachable.

Save a deliberate Codex work checkpoint to Basic Memory with changed files, verification, decisions, blockers, and the next action.

Orient Codex from Basic Memory before substantial repo work by reading active tasks, decisions, recent Codex checkpoints, and repo conventions.

Set up Basic Memory for Codex at user or project level by mapping a Basic Memory project and seeding schemas.

Report the Basic Memory for Codex configuration, reachability, hook expectations, recent Codex checkpoints, and active tasks.

Capture a durable engineering decision in Basic Memory with rationale, alternatives, consequences, and affected work.

Quickly save a small fact, reminder, or user preference into Basic Memory from Codex without turning it into a full decision or checkpoint.

Share a personal Basic Memory note to a configured team project from Codex with attribution and explicit confirmation.

Capture a durable engineering decision in Basic Memory with rationale, alternatives, consequences, and affected work. Use when the user makes or asks to record a real choice — "let's go with X", "record this decision", or runs /basic-memory:bm-decide.

Quickly capture a thought, fact, or reminder into Basic Memory as a lightweight note. Use when the user says "remember that…", "note this", "save this to memory", or runs /basic-memory:bm-remember. For quick deliberate capture — not full decision or session records.

Save a deliberate work checkpoint to Basic Memory with the story, changed files, verification, decisions, blockers, and the next action. Use when the user asks to checkpoint, wrap up, hand off, or remember the state of the work.

Apply the user-customizable writing standard for Basic Memory notes created or substantially revised by Claude. Use with bm-remember, the basic-memory output style's decision captures, and other Basic Memory note-writing workflows.

Apply the user-customizable writing standard for Basic Memory notes created or substantially revised by Codex. Use with bm-checkpoint, bm-decide, bm-remember, and other Basic Memory note-writing workflows.

Analyze a complete literary work into a structured Basic Memory knowledge graph. Covers schema design, entity seeding, chapter-by-chapter processing, cross-referencing, validation, and visualization.

Use when addressing Basic Memory pull request feedback, failed checks, or Codex review blockers, then re-running the latest-head review gate.

Use when explicitly creating or updating a Basic Memory pull request. This compatibility entry point delegates the full workflow to pull-request and the latest-head Codex gate to pr-review-loop.

Use when opening or updating a GitHub PR - writes a detailed PR description that explains what changed, why it changed, how it was implemented, and how it was tested.

Enforce the Basic Machines GitHub PR review loop before merging. Use whenever Codex is preparing to merge, squash-merge, auto-merge, declare a PR ready, monitor Codex comments, address review feedback, or wait for Codex approval on a GitHub PR, especially when the user says "approved", "merge", "ship", "PR is ready", "monitor Codex comments", or "address Codex feedback".

Drive GitHub pull request work end to end. Use when Codex is asked to open, update, describe, push to, monitor, review, address comments on, declare ready, or merge a PR. Covers branch hygiene, PR descriptions with why/what/testing/risk, CI checks, Codex review-loop monitoring, comment handling, and the final merge gate.

Write, refactor, and review Python for clarity, explicit behavior, local reasoning, strong types, and minimal abstraction. Use when creating or changing nontrivial Python, simplifying object-heavy or helper-heavy code, evaluating whether code is Pythonic, or reviewing Python maintainability in Basic Memory repositories.

Promote a note from your personal Basic Memory project to a shared team project, with attribution. Use when the user says "share this with the team", "publish this decision", or runs /basic-memory:bm-share. This is the deliberate way to write to a team workspace — auto-capture never does.

Guide someone new to Basic Memory through designing and building a complete personal knowledge system — interview them about what they want to track, propose a structure, build it with schemas and instruction notes, teach them to use it, and set up their AI assistant to load it automatically. Use this skill whenever a user says they're new to Basic Memory, wants to 'get started', 'set up', or 'onboard' with Basic Memory, doesn't know what to use it for, asks how to organize their memory project or knowledge base, wants help designing folders/schemas/conventions, or asks how to make their assistant remember context between sessions. Also use it when a user has an empty or messy Basic Memory project and wants structure.

Use when generating Basic Memory PR, changelog, release, or weekly images from Codex.

Use when reviewing Basic Machines code for house style, architecture risk, pre-merge hardening, or whether a change fits basic-memory/basic-memory-cloud conventions.

Synthesize GitHub delivery context into a concise Basic Memory project update. Use in CI after `bm ci collect` prepares a ProjectUpdateContext; return only structured AgentSynthesis JSON for `bm ci publish`.

Capture the current state of a working thread or conversation into a single coherent Basic Memory note — synthesize where it landed, don't append a log. On re-capture, rewrite the same note in place instead of duplicating. Use mid-thread or end-of-thread when decisions, insights, or context are worth preserving.

Resume prior work by rebuilding context from the Basic Memory knowledge graph — pick up where you left off using memory:// URLs, recent activity, and search. Use when starting a session or when the user says 'continue with...', 'back to...', or 'where were we?'

Curate the Basic Memory knowledge graph: find orphan notes and suggest links, propose typed relations, merge duplicates, audit tags and folders, and build hub notes. Use to organize, connect, and improve a knowledge base as notes accumulate.

How to write well-structured Basic Memory notes: frontmatter, observations with semantic categories, relations with wiki-links, and best practices for building a rich knowledge graph. Use when creating or improving notes.

Schema lifecycle management for Basic Memory: discover unschemaed notes, infer schemas, create and edit schema definitions, validate notes, and detect drift. Use when working with structured note types (Task, Person, Meeting, etc.) to maintain consistency across the knowledge graph.

Task management via Basic Memory schemas: create, track, and resume structured tasks that survive context compaction. Uses BM's schema system for uniform notes queryable through the knowledge graph.

Use the Basic Memory knowledge graph for persistent memory across sessions. Search before answering; capture decisions, meetings, and insights as notes.

Defragment and reorganize agent memory files: split bloated files, merge duplicates, remove stale information, and restructure the memory hierarchy. Use when memory files have grown unwieldy, contain redundancies, or need reorganization. Run periodically (weekly) or on demand.

Process unstructured external input (meeting transcripts, conversation logs, pasted documents) into structured Basic Memory entities. Extracts entities, searches for existing matches, proposes new entities with approval, creates notes with observations and relations, and captures action items.

Manage entity status transitions in Basic Memory: archive completed work, move notes between status folders, update frontmatter, and handle edge cases. Use when marking items complete, archiving old entities, or managing any folder-based status workflow.

Structured metadata search for Basic Memory: query notes by custom frontmatter fields using equality, range, array, and nested filters. Use when finding notes by status, priority, confidence, or any custom YAML field rather than free-text content.

Sleep-time memory reflection: review recent conversations and daily notes, extract insights, and consolidate into long-term memory. Use when triggered by cron, heartbeat, or explicit request to reflect on recent activity. Runs as background processing to improve memory quality over time.

Research an external subject using web search, synthesize findings into a structured Basic Memory entity. Use when asked to research a company, person, technology, or topic — or when a bare name or URL is provided that implies a research request.