memax recall

Semantic search across your memories. Returns the most relevant pieces of knowledge for a given query.

Semantic search against your hub's memories. Used by agents (via MCP and hooks) and by humans directly.

Usage

memax recall <query> [options]
memax recall --hook [options]       # agent-injectable output
echo "your query" | memax recall    # query via stdin

If no query argument is given and stdin is piped, the piped text is used as the query.

Options

Flag	Short	Description	Default
`--limit <n>`	`-l`	Maximum number of memories returned.	`10`
`--topic-id <id>`		Restrict results to memories in this topic.	—
`--hub <slug>`		Boost a hub in ranking (defaults to the active hub).	—
`--no-rerank`		Skip the rerank stage (faster; uses local scoring only).	off
`--max-tokens <n>`		Cap the approximate total output length in tokens.	—
`--hook`		Output in a compact, agent-injectable format. Intended for custom scripts or agents that want to inject recall results into a prompt themselves — the hooks installed by `memax setup --hooks` do not call this.	off
`--format <text\|json>`		Output format.	`text`

There is no --hint, --threshold, or --quiet flag today.

--tags and --include-archived are declared on the CLI but are not currently honored end-to-end. --tags is the one the CLI doesn't forward — it never reaches the server. --include-archived is sent to the server, but the recall pipeline ignores include_archived and unconditionally excludes archived/processing memories. Treat both as no-ops for now.

Examples

Basic recall

memax recall "how does authentication work?"

Limit

memax recall "deploy process" --limit 5

Within a topic

memax recall "API versioning" --topic-id top_abc123

Hub boost

memax recall "billing model" --hub team-alpha

Agent-injectable format (for custom scripts)

memax recall "$USER_PROMPT" --hook --max-tokens 2000

JSON output for scripting

memax recall "deploy process" --format json | jq '.memories[0].chunk_content'

Query via stdin

cat question.txt | memax recall --limit 3

Behavior

Semantic retrieval is the default: the query is embedded and the closest chunks are returned, then re-scored by a reranker (unless --no-rerank). Boundary and archived-state filters are applied server-side.
Archived memories are always excluded from recall today — the recall pipeline filters them out unconditionally. The --include-archived flag is accepted on the CLI and the CLI does forward include_archived to the server, but the server currently ignores it.
Rerank is on by default and materially improves relevance; --no-rerank is a latency knob for cases that don't need it.
The --hook format is a compact, agent-injectable output format. Note: the hook script installed by memax setup --hooks / memax hook install claude-code does not call memax recall --hook itself today — it only prints a static reinforcement block. --hook remains available for custom scripts or agents that want to call recall and inject the result into a prompt themselves.

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