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OpenBot

Give your OpenBot teammates a memory that lasts, powered by Hindsight. OpenBot runs a team of persistent AI agents on your own computer — Claude, Codex, Grok, Gemini, OpenCode and more. Connect Hindsight as an MCP server and every agent can recall what it learned in earlier threads, retain new facts as it works, and reflect over everything it knows about you and your projects.

Why this matters​

OpenBot agents are persistent, but their context is not: each thread compacts as it fills, and what one agent learns is invisible to the next. OpenBot's built-in memory helps, but it's small (a few kilobytes per agent) and private to one agent. Hindsight adds a durable layer that sits beside it:

  • Recall is semantic — it finds the relevant fact even when the words don't match.
  • Retain keeps facts, experiences and decisions across threads and restarts.
  • Reflect reasons over everything an agent knows to answer a question.
  • One shared bank means the whole team draws on the same memory, instead of 17 agents each keeping their own stale copy.

What it does​

Connecting the Hindsight MCP server gives every OpenBot agent the Hindsight tools (recall, retain, sync_retain, reflect, mental-model and document tools). Point each agent — or your whole team — at a Hindsight bank, and:

  • Memory outlives the thread — facts retained in one session are recalled in the next, after compaction, and after a restart.
  • Shared or isolated, your choice — give the team one bank for shared memory, or give each agent its own bank for strict isolation. The bank is chosen by the MCP URL.
  • Same data everywhere — the memory an OpenBot agent writes is the same bank your other Hindsight integrations and automations read, so they see one consistent view.

Hindsight and OpenBot's built-in memory​

OpenBot ships its own built-in memory (the remember / search_memories tools) — a small, per-agent store. When Hindsight is connected, an agent has both sets of memory tools available, and the two stores don't share. Left to its own judgement, an agent may still save some facts to OpenBot's built-in store instead of to Hindsight.

Two things follow:

  • The MCP connection is a capability, not a habit. Connecting Hindsight makes its tools available to every agent on the server — but an agent only uses them when it decides to. To make agents consistently recall from and retain to Hindsight (rather than the built-in store), pair the connection with the Hindsight Memory skill (see Make it automatic).
  • Hindsight is the shared, durable layer. Built-in memory is per-agent and small; a Hindsight bank is semantic, long-lived, and shared across every agent pointed at it.

Installation​

✨ Recommended: Hindsight Cloud — sign up free, create a bank, grab an API key, and skip self-hosting.

Open Apps in OpenBot, find Hindsight, and click Connect. You'll be asked for two values:

FieldValue
MCP URLhttps://api.hindsight.vectorize.io/mcp/<bank>/ (replace <bank>)
API keyYour Hindsight Cloud API key (hsk_…)

Enable the app for the agents that should share the memory.

Add it manually as a custom MCP server​

You can wire Hindsight up today without the marketplace listing. In OpenBot's server settings, add a URL MCP server:

  • URL: https://api.hindsight.vectorize.io/mcp/<bank>/
  • Header: Authorization: Bearer hsk_…

Self-hosting​

Prefer to run Hindsight on your own machine? Start a local server and point the MCP URL at it:

pip install hindsight-all
export HINDSIGHT_API_LLM_API_KEY=your-openai-key
hindsight-api

Then use http://localhost:8888/mcp/<bank>/ as the MCP URL. A local server with no auth needs no API key — leave that field blank.

Choosing a bank​

The bank is part of the MCP URL (/mcp/<bank>/), so each connection is scoped to exactly one bank — agents never have to pass a bank_id.

  • Team memory — give every agent the same URL (e.g. /mcp/team/).
  • Per-agent memory — give each agent its own URL (e.g. /mcp/research-bot/, /mcp/ops-bot/).

See the MCP server reference for the full tool list and bank-selection rules.

Make it automatic (optional)​

Connecting the app gives agents the memory tools; the Hindsight Memory skill gives them the habit — recall before acting, retain durable facts, and use Hindsight's tools instead of OpenBot's built-in memory. Download SKILL.md, add it to OpenBot's skill library, and enable it for the agents that use Hindsight.

Enabling it across agents. A skill is enabled per agent — there's no "all agents" switch, and new agents don't inherit it automatically:

  • Enable it on each agent that should use Hindsight (from the agent's Skills panel, or ask an agent to run install_local_skill).
  • The MCP server connection, by contrast, is added once in the Local server's settings and is available to every agent — so the tools reach everyone; only the skill (the habit) is per-agent.
  • For Claude agents specifically, a skill placed in ~/.agents/skills/<slug>/ is loaded by every Claude agent automatically. Other providers (OpenCode, Codex, Gemini, …) need the per-agent install.

The cleanest long-term answer to "every agent should use Hindsight automatically" is Hindsight replacing OpenBot's built-in memory rather than sitting beside it — tracked upstream in nightly-labs/openbot#3682.

Try it​

Ask an agent to remember something, then start a fresh thread and ask it back:

Remember that we decided to standardize on Postgres for all new services.

(new thread) What database did we standardize on, and why?

With the Hindsight Memory skill enabled, the agent saves with Hindsight's sync_retain and the second thread recalls the decision from Hindsight — even though its own context was empty.

Tip: if the first thread reports it saved to its own "essential memories" and the second thread can't recall it, the agent used OpenBot's built-in memory instead of Hindsight. Enable the memory skill (below) so it uses Hindsight's retain/recall.