Cordelia: Your Agent's Memory on Every Machine You Use

Russell Wing, Martin Stevens

Seed Drill -- October 2026

v3.0 draft -- describes what v1 is and nothing beyond it. Supersedes v2.3; long-term direction moved to a separate vision document.

Abstract

AI coding agents now keep memory: preferences, decisions, the reasons behind them. That memory lives in one folder, on one machine, filed under the path of the directory the agent ran in. Move to another machine and it is gone; clone the same project somewhere else and it is gone; hand it to a hosted memory service and someone else holds the plaintext.

Cordelia keeps an agent's memory in step across a person's machines, so that the same agent, with the same context, is there wherever they work. Memory is never shared with another person. It is encrypted on the device that wrote it and travels through relays that store only ciphertext and hold no keys. Each device has its own key and is added or removed individually. A project's memory follows the project, matched by its git remote, not by where it sits on disk. Concurrent edits never silently lose work. Version 1 does this for Claude Code's memory.

Read the Paper

Whitepaper v3 on GitHub What v1 is, how it works, what it promises Vision Where Cordelia goes after v1, and why

Contents

  1. The problem -- Agent memory is per machine, per path, and per vendor
  2. What Cordelia does -- Pairing devices and syncing Claude Code's memory in three commands
  3. Design -- Devices and trust; channels, keys and sealed channel states; signed, replaceable items; relays, the outbox and sync; the Claude Code adapter
  4. Security model -- What relays see and never see, threats and mitigations, non-goals
  5. What v1 deliberately is not -- No public channels, no key holders, no token, no hosted plaintext
  6. Status and roadmap -- Channels shared between people (messages, skills, secrets; never memory), more agents, more relays

Companion Documents

Document Purpose
vision.md Direction beyond v1: shared channels, other agents, relays run by others, and how relays might be paid for
parameter-rationale.md Protocol constants and how each was derived
risk-model.md Formal risk analysis behind the vision's section on why this matters
whitepaper v2.3 (archived) The earlier, broader design (April 2026), kept for history

Key References

  • RFC 9000 -- QUIC transport
  • RFC 8032 / RFC 7748 -- Ed25519 signatures and X25519 key agreement
  • RFC 5869 / RFC 2104 -- HKDF and HMAC
  • NIST SP 800-38D -- AES-GCM
  • Coutts et al. -- Cardano P2P networking and the peer governor
  • Nostr NIP-01 -- Addressable (replaceable) events