A memory system that only answers from its own store is a filing cabinet, not a partner. The transactive rule the project is named for — not knowing is fine when you know who does — needed a holder registry, a directory query, and a referral that never leaks the text it may not read. - schema v5 adds `holders` (person/agent/service, declared topics, contact). A holder with memories exists whether or not anybody registered them; the registry adds reachability, it does not grant existence. - `who_knows` ranks holders by their own memories and is deliberately NOT filtered by visibility: "she knows" is the answer. The answer is filtered. - `ask` searches the asker's visible scope first (hop 0), then walks the directory with a visited set and a hop budget. Three terminal states: answered, referred, no_holder_knows. Nobody knowing is a result, not an error. - Confidence is ordinal, not calibrated: relative strength, coverage, and declared topics. Every hit carries the raw numbers and the basis lines that produced the score, so a ranking can be argued with. - Faces: HTTP (/api/holders, /api/who_knows, /api/ask), CLI (holders, holder-set, holder-rm, who-knows, ask), MCP (who_knows, ask, list_holders). Four bugs found by running the thing, not by reading it: - FTS5 refuses bm25() inside MAX(); the aggregate uses FTS5's own `rank` column. - A CJK question is longer than the sentence that answers it, so the whole-run phrase matched nothing. The query now ORs adjacent bigram phrases; adjacency is kept, equal length is not. Latin path untouched, baseline unaffected. - The hop budget counted the asker as a hop, so max_hops=1 asked nobody. - A second, stricter readability test in _answered() disagreed with the SQL visibility clause and hid a memory the asker was allowed to read. The SQL clause is the only authority now. A method named `list` shadowed the builtin inside its own class and made mypy reject the return annotation; renamed rather than cast around it. Proof: 155 pytest, 12 Go tests, ruff and mypy clean on touched files, pyright ledger unchanged at 62, and scripts/mcp_write_smoke.sh drives two principals on one SQLite file — the husband asks through MCP, gets `referred` with his wife's contact channel, and her private sentence appears nowhere in the reply.
Ely-Eye MCP
Ely-Eye MCP exposes a local Context Cartridge memory store as a stdio Model Context Protocol server for coding agents such as Codex and Claude Code.
The server is local-first and read-only against <ely-eye-home>/data/ely_eye.sqlite. It reads Evidence Atoms, cartridge manifests, Memory DNA, proof-suite artifacts, HashHop proofs, and compiled evidence packs. The production database is never modified.
It can be deployed for any .ely_eye store. Identity is anchored on the database file, not on the Ely-Eye repository layout, so the server walks up from the working directory to find .ely_eye/data/ely_eye.sqlite, or takes an explicit --ely-eye-home.
One-command setup
The installer downloads a checksum-verified prebuilt binary for the platform when a tagged release is available, otherwise it builds from source with Go from a repository checkout. Either way it installs the binary into <ely-eye-home>/bin and registers the server with Codex and Claude Code. No Docker.
Windows:
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File .\ely-eye-mcp\install.ps1 -Client both
Linux and macOS:
bash ./ely-eye-mcp/install.sh --client both
Force a source build (requires Go 1.25 or newer):
bash ./ely-eye-mcp/install.sh --method source
Codex registration uses codex mcp add. Claude Code project registration writes .mcp.json at the project root; --scope user registers through the Claude CLI instead.
Manual run
From inside a project that owns an .ely_eye store:
go run ./cmd/ely-eye-mcp server
Or point at an explicit store:
go run ./cmd/ely-eye-mcp server --ely-eye-home /path/to/.ely_eye
Tools
ely_eye_status returns atom, source, cartridge, token, and cache-layer counts.
list_cartridges lists local Context Cartridges with manifest JSON and Memory DNA.
get_cartridge reads one cartridge plus artifact metadata, memory capsule index, and asset report.
search_atoms queries the local SQLite FTS index and returns ranked Evidence Atoms.
fetch_atom reads one Evidence Atom by exact id.
compile_context compiles a question into a local evidence pack with the same profile names used by the app (live_demo, extreme_context, library_100m, research_theater).
list_proof_suites lists PRD proof suites under <ely-eye-home>/data/eval_proofs.
list_hashhop_proofs aggregates HashHop and Visual HashHop long-context addressing proofs by kind, hop count, and token budget, with pass counts and example proofs. Proofs are deduplicated by content-derived id.
get_proof_suite reads one PRD proof suite by id, including all checks and a summary of its HashHop proofs.
Resources
ely-eye://project/prd, ely-eye://project/readme, and ely-eye://project/mcp-research expose PRD.md, the project README, and these research notes when those files are present next to the store.
Releases
Pushing a mcp-v* tag runs .github/workflows/mcp-release.yml, which cross-compiles the pure-Go server (CGO disabled) for Linux, macOS, and Windows on amd64 and arm64, then publishes the archives with a SHA256SUMS manifest to a GitHub Release. The installers consume those assets.
Security posture
The server opens SQLite read-only with mode=ro and PRAGMA query_only(1), and uses busy_timeout so reads tolerate concurrent writes by the Ely-Eye app. Tools expose structured outputs and return tool-level errors for invalid inputs so agents self-correct through normal tool calls. Proof ids are validated as single path elements before any filesystem read. The server uses stdio transport for local clients and takes credentials only from the local environment.