I Built an AI That Remembers Me
Hey friend! 🖖
A few days ago, on Christmas, I open-sourced something I've been building: an AI assistant that actually remembers who I am. I called it Lares, after the ancient Roman household guardian spirits.
This isn't a product pitch — I'm not selling anything. This is me sharing a rabbit hole I fell into, what I learned, and why I think it matters.
The Problem With AI Assistants
Here's the thing about ChatGPT, Claude, and every other AI assistant: they're goldfish. Every conversation starts from almost zero. You re-explain what you're working on, what you care about, what happened last week. Every. Single. Time.
"But wait," you might say, "ChatGPT has memory now! It remembers things about me!"
True. Modern LLMs have added memory features. ChatGPT can store facts about you ("User likes Python", "User lives in Livorno"). Claude has Projects. These help. But they're fundamentally different from what Lares does.
Here's the distinction:
LLM memory is done to the AI by the system. ChatGPT's memory extracts facts automatically. You can view and delete them, but the AI itself has no agency over what it remembers. It's a feature bolted onto a stateless system.
Lares memory is operated by the AI itself. Lares sees its memory blocks and actively edits them with tools. When it learns I'm training for Aconcagua, it chooses to write that to its Human block. It can update its own persona, reorganize its ideas, decide what's worth remembering and what isn't.
It's like the difference between having a filing cabinet someone else maintains for you versus keeping your own journal.
There's also ownership. ChatGPT's memory lives on OpenAI's servers. Lares's memory lives on a NUC in my house. I own it. I can back it up, inspect it, delete it. It's mine.
I wanted something different — an AI that knows me, that learns over time, that can actually be useful for the messy, context-heavy reality of my life. Not a tool I use, but something closer to a companion.
Like in the movies, you know?