cognee: Skill for Claude Code

Install and run cognee

Install

Requires Python 3.10–3.14. Prefer uv:

uv venv && source .venv/bin/activate
uv pip install cognee            # from PyPI
# or, working inside this repo:
uv pip install -e .

Add extras only when needed — examples: cognee[postgres], cognee[neo4j], cognee[docling] (office/HTML document parsing, slim), cognee[docs] (unstructured), cognee[anthropic], cognee[ollama], cognee[aws]. The full list is in pyproject.toml under [project.optional-dependencies].

Configure

The only required setting is an LLM API key. Create .env in the working directory (or export the variable):

LLM_API_KEY="your_openai_api_key"

Defaults need no services: SQLite (relational), LanceDB (vector), and Ladybug (graph), all stored locally. OpenAI is the default LLM and embedding provider — if you configure a different LLM but not embeddings (or vice versa), the other silently stays on OpenAI. For other providers and databases use the cognee-integrations skill.

First run

As of cognee 1.x the memory API — remember, recall, forget, improve — is the primary surface. All SDK functions are async. Minimal end-to-end script:

import asyncio
import cognee


async def main():
    await cognee.remember("Cognee turns documents into AI memory.")
    results = await cognee.recall("What does cognee do?")
    print(results)


asyncio.run(main())

remember() is the whole ingestion path in one call — it runs add() + cognify(), then improve() to index the graph (self_improvement=True by default). It accepts text, file paths, URLs, and binary streams, with an optional dataset_name="my_project"; pass datasets=["my_project"] to recall() to stay inside one dataset.

recall() auto-routes the query to a search strategy by default. Pass query_type=SearchType.CHUNKS (etc.) to pin one, or auto_route=False to fall back to GRAPH_COMPLETION.

Session memory is the other half of the API — remember(..., session_id="chat_1") writes to a fast session cache rather than running add+cognify inline, and recall(..., session_id="chat_1") reads it back (session hits short-circuit the graph search). With the default self_improvement=True it still bridges that data into the permanent graph in the background; improve(dataset=..., session_ids=[...]) does the same explicitly. Session memory runs on the session cache, which is on by default (CACHING=true); setting CACHING=false disables it entirely and makes remember(session_id=...) raise.