Recall and memory

Two features on one index. recall gives the web UI’s sidebar a semantic search over everything you have ever asked zorp. memory turns that same index into something a live turn can read, so a fact from a thread you finished in March can be recalled in a thread you started today.

The loopback rule

Conversation text goes to a loopback address or it goes nowhere. There is no remote embedding provider, no flag that adds one, and no fallback when the local model is missing. This corpus is your whole history with an agent that has been reading your files, and a feature that stayed working by posting it to an API would be worse than one that stops.

Four layers hold that up, because any one of them could be wrong. The endpoint has to be a loopback literal or localhost, and it has to still resolve to loopback. The addresses it resolved to are the only ones the HTTP client can reach, through a resolver that performs no lookup of its own. Redirects are refused. Proxy detection from the environment is off, so HTTP_PROXY cannot route the text through somebody else’s server. The tests for all of this count connections to a loopback canary rather than checking for an error, because a failed request and a request never made look the same from the caller’s side.

How memory stays honest

• The box is unticked on every message. Retrieval spends context and puts old text in front of the model, so it is a per-message decision. The model cannot ask for a recall; there is no tool for it.
• A memory is a quotation, never a summary. Nothing reads your history and writes down what it learned. There is no fact table and no stored sentence a model composed about your past, because that is the shape in which an agent’s guesses turn into its own evidence. Assistant-written lines are labelled as a model’s earlier output.
• Recalled text is data. It arrives inside a fence whose marker is minted for that one turn, under the same boundary sentence a skill body gets. It grants no tool, widens no approval, bypasses no denylist, and is never written back into the store, which is what stops the recalled block being re-embedded and recalled again.

Setup

ollama pull nomic-embed-text
cargo run -p zorp-web --features memory   # memory turns recall on too

The server indexes existing conversations after startup, sweeps every five minutes (ZORP_RECALL_SWEEP_SECS, 0 disables), and indexes an active conversation after each turn.