total-recall

Total Recall — Autonomous Agent Memory

The only memory skill that watches on its own.

No database. No vectors. No manual saves. Just an LLM observer that compresses your conversations into prioritised notes, consolidates when they grow, and recovers anything missed. Five layers of redundancy, zero maintenance. ~$0.00/month (using free-tier models).

While other memory skills ask you to remember to remember, this one just pays attention.

Architecture

Layer 1: Observer (cron, every 15-30 min)
    ↓ compresses recent messages → observations.md
Layer 2: Reflector (auto-triggered when observations > 8000 words)
    ↓ consolidates, removes superseded info → 40-60% reduction
Layer 3: Session Recovery (runs on every /new or /reset)
    ↓ catches any session the Observer missed
Layer 4: Reactive Watcher (inotify daemon, Linux only)
    ↓ triggers Observer after 40+ new JSONL writes, 5-min cooldown
Layer 5: Pre-compaction hook (memoryFlush)
    ↓ emergency capture before OpenClaw compacts context

What It Does

• Observer reads recent session transcripts (JSONL), sends them to an LLM, and appends compressed observations to observations.md with priority levels (high, medium, low)
• Reflector kicks in when observations grow too large, consolidating related items and dropping stale low-priority entries
• Session Recovery runs at session start, checks if the previous session was captured, and does an emergency observation if not
• Reactive Watcher watches the session directory with inotify so high-activity periods get captured faster than the cron interval
• Pre-compaction hook fires when OpenClaw is about to compact context, ensuring nothing is lost

Quick Start

1. Install the skill

clawdhub install total-recall

2. Set your API key

Add to your .env or OpenClaw config:

OPENROUTER_API_KEY=sk-or-v1-xxxxx

3. Run the setup script

bash skills/total-recall/scripts/setup.sh

This will:

• Create the memory directory structure (memory/, logs/, backups)
• On Linux with inotify + systemd: install the reactive watcher service
• Print cron job and agent configuration instructions for you to add manually