Chronicle MCP

Chronicle MCP: Local AI Chat History Search & Memory

Private, offline memory for your AI coding agents. Chronicle MCP (chronicle-mcp-server) is a local stdio MCP server that indexes your Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT and Cline chat transcripts on your own machine and serves BM25 search over them, so agents can recall past conversations without re-pasting them, using up to 40% fewer context tokens. Your archive and index stay on disk: no cloud service, account, or API key.

Why · CLI Mechanics · Setup Wizard · Tool Catalog · Installation · Auto-Save · Tests · Comparison · FAQ · License

Chronicle is a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that syncs, cleans, formats, and indexes AI chat transcripts entirely on your machine. By bridging the gap between local editor history and large language model contexts, Chronicle allows agents to search, compare, retrieve, and reference past conversation logs. It features optimized token-saving heuristics that compress code blocks and limit message lengths, reducing context window utilization by up to 40 percent.

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What's new in 1.6.2

• Fixes fresh installs. Earlier releases let pip install mcp 2.x, which the server cannot run on. The dependency is now mcp>=1.22,<2.
• Rewritten tool definitions. Every tool has a title, a description of what it does and when to use it, side effects and return value, and annotations (readOnlyHint, destructiveHint, ...). Every parameter is documented and every operation selector is an enum.
• Real error results. Failures now come back with isError: true, and unknown operation names are rejected instead of silently running a different operation.
• New ways to run it: uvx chronicle-mcp-server, chronicle serve, chronicle --version and a Dockerfile.
• Server instructions, a `recall_past_work` prompt, and two resources: chronicle://capabilities and chronicle://chats.

What's new in 1.6.1

• CI on Python 3.10 to 3.13, plus build and twine check on every push and pull request.
• Accurate tool catalog: 8 tools plus the start_session prompt, which maintain_storage(op_type="capabilities") now reports too.
• Richer PyPI metadata (project links, keywords, classifiers) and a cleaner repository with no committed build artifacts.

See the full CHANGELOG for earlier releases.

Key Architectural Capabilities

Format Normalization Engine

AI providers and editor clients save conversation logs in diverse formats. Chronicle normalizes these structures into a standard role-and-content message format:

• ChatGPT Exports: ChatGPT exports conversation histories in recursive mapping node structures. Chronicle traverses and flattens these maps, sorts messages chronologically by creation timestamp, and extracts the plain-text message threads.
• Claude Exports: Claude structures messages as flat lists nested under the chat_messages field. Chronicle parses these lists, maps custom sender roles (such as human and assistant) to standard roles, and cleans the text strings.
• Generic and Markdown Formats: Chronicle includes parsers for flat JSON message lists (such as Cline or Continue) and structured Markdown logs (mapping headers like User and Assistant to message boundaries).

Context Token Optimization

Large chat logs can quickly exhaust context windows and increase API costs. Chronicle implements proactive token-saving mechanisms:

• Code Block Summarization: Automatically replaces verbose code blocks with metadata summaries indicating the programming language and line count. This behavior can be disabled on demand to read full code snippets.
• Length Limiting: Truncates extremely long individual messages at a configurable character threshold, appending a notice that the user can re-run the tool with expanded limits if necessary.

Context Window Token Savings Graph

To verify these savings, we executed multi-turn conversation benchmarks. The graph below displays total token usage over a sequence of message turns:

By condensing repetitive syntax and large raw code snippets, Chronicle achieves up to 40 percent token savings, directly lowering API usage costs and preventing context-window exhaustion.

Hybrid Splitting & BM25 Scoring Search Engine

To make workspace searches extremely sharp and retrieve context-aware answers, Chronicle incorporates a state-of-the-art retrieval pipeline:

• Hybrid Document Splitting: Slices long conversations into logical parts at indexing time. Splits are triggered temporally if a gap of more than 1800 seconds (30 minutes) occurs between consecutive messages, or lexically if the Jaccard similarity of vocabulary sliding groups of 4 messages drops below 0.12. Each split is stored and queried as a virtual document (filename__chunk_idx).
• Okapi BM25 Scorer: Replaces naive keyword matching and raw TF-IDF with Okapi BM25 scoring (k1 = 1.5 and b = 0.85). The parameter b = 0.85 enforces an aggressive length penalty, which ensures long, rambling chat logs do not overshadow short, precise bug fixes.
• Handoff Receipts Prioritization: Integrates a direct tool to save compact agent state files documenting modified paths, commitments, skipped tests, and next actions. Active handoff receipts are automatically prioritized and bubbled to the very top of search results.

Command Line Interface Mechanics

The cli.py file serves as the system's entry point, registering a unified chronicle command on the system path via the pyproject.toml configuration (chronicle = "cli:main").

1. Interactive Setup Wizard

Chronicle features an interactive, zero-dependency TTY setup wizard. Running chronicle setup or executing chronicle without arguments in an interactive terminal starts the setup flow:

[!TIP]

The setup wizard is styled with a premium purple theme, supporting arrow-key navigation, spacebar toggles, inline input editing, and real-time path validation!

Keyboard Navigation & Controls

Use the following controls when interacting with the select menu:

Wizard Phases & Actions

The wizard guides you through the following phases:

[!IMPORTANT]

HOW TO USE THE WIZARD — A STEP-BY-STEP SHOWCASE GUIDE

1. Start the Process: Launch the wizard with chronicle setup in your terminal.

2. Split Monolithic Files: Paste the path to your exported conversations.json (from ChatGPT or Claude). This splits them into clean individual threads inside your chats folder.

3. Define Your Chats Directory: Keep the default ~/universal-chats folder or type a custom path.

4. Select Your Target IDEs:

* Press Down Arrow to scroll down to VS Code, Trae, etc.

* Press Space to toggle selections.

* If you select Antigravity, checking it will automatically expand sub-choices (Antigravity IDE, Antigravity 2.0, Antigravity CLI) right underneath!

* Scroll down to Other (Enter custom entry) and type any system-specific folder name to add emerging editors.

* Real-time Path Validation: If the custom configuration path parent doesn't exist, a warning alerts you at the bottom: ⚠ App/IDE " " was not found on your system.. Erase it with Backspace or type a valid path to proceed.

5. Complete and Launch: Press Enter to write the JSON configuration file for all selected apps. The Live Environment Dashboard will display a complete summary of your workspace configs.

Click to expand step-by-step Setup Walkthrough

Step 1: Launch the Setup Wizard

Run the setup command:

chronicle setup

Step 2: The Monolithic Split Engine

The wizard asks if you want to partition any monolithic chat logs (such as the single conversations.json from ChatGPT/Claude exports) into separate files in your new storage folder:

── Chronicle Archive Setup ─────────────────────────────────────

Do you want to split a single conversations.json file? Enter path to export file (or press ENTER to skip):

Step 3: Configure Storage Path

Define the folder path where Chronicle will clean and store all conversation history:

Enter path to folder containing your conversations [Default: ~/universal-chats]: 

✓ Using existing storage directory: /Users/username/universal-chats Successfully set chats directory to: /Users/username/universal-chats

Step 4: Interactive IDE Selector

An interactive selection menu with a premium purple theme. Navigate with the arrow keys, toggle checkboxes with the Spacebar, edit custom inputs