Memory and vault

How Nexus remembers — the memory ledger, recall, your vault of notes, people pages, and local sync.

Nexus keeps two kinds of memory, unified behind one search and one verb. You rarely need to think about the split — but here's how it works.

The memory ledger

Everything episodic — things that happened, tied to a moment — lands in an append-only daily log. Chat conversations, skill runs, and captures write here first, always. Because it's append-only and write-ahead, a fact is never lost to a routing decision: recall will find it no matter where else it did or didn't go.

Remember — the one verb

In chat, you don't file things. Say it, and the agent saves durable facts, decisions, and preferences on its own — and tells you where the note landed ("noted — added to Sarah Chen's page"). Behind the scenes:

  1. The fact is appended to today's ledger entry (always).
  2. If it clearly concerns a person, place, organization, or project whose note exists in your vault — matched by exact title, the same contract wikilinks use, never fuzzily — a dated line is also appended to that note's ## Log section. Grafts only ever append; the worst a wrong match can do is add one visible, dated line.

Dates are computed in your timezone (device timezone by default; pin one in Settings → Preferences).

Recall

Ask about anything and the agent searches both stores — ledger and vault — with provenance on every hit, so you can see whether an answer came from a note or from something that happened last Tuesday. On the Free plan, recall reaches back 7 days; paid plans recall your full history. When older matches exist outside your window, Nexus tells you how many (never their content).

A few honest boundaries: briefs are regenerable renderings and are deliberately excluded from recall (they'd only echo their sources); very large notes (over ~100 KB) are excluded from the search index; and you can exclude any note explicitly with nexus_index: false in its frontmatter.

The vault

The Vault tab is your durable notes — reference material addressed by topic or entity rather than by date.

  • Recency-first browsing with entity chips (people, places, organizations, …) to filter by kind; folders are available as a secondary facet.
  • Wikilinks[[Note Title]] links resolve by title (falling back to filename); links to notes that don't exist yet render visibly dead rather than silently.
  • People — person notes get a board and individual pages. If a person's note carries a contact cadence in frontmatter (cadence, last_contact), Nexus computes staleness — who you're overdue to talk to.
  • Memory log lens — browse the ledger day by day, right inside the vault.
  • Search — press Enter to run recall across notes and ledger together.

Edits are conflict-safe: concurrent writes are detected, never silently merged. Deleted notes move to a trash area and are permanently removed after 30 days.

Syncing with a local vault (Obsidian, plain Markdown)

If you run the local Nexus Agent, it can mirror your cloud vault to a folder on your machine, two-way:

  • Changes flow both directions (file-watcher plus a periodic sweep).
  • Conflicts become conflict copies — an Obsidian-style duplicate file you reconcile by hand — never a silent overwrite. Cloud is authoritative for the original.
  • Deletes are conservative: deletions propagate through a sync-trash, and an edit always beats a delete.

Your Markdown round-trips byte-identical, frontmatter included. The cloud copy is canonical; git or any other backup you keep is yours to layer on top.