<2-3 sentences summarising what the project addresses and solves, the target audience, and the benefit.> Honcho is an AI-native memory library designed for building stateful agents with advanced capabilities. It provides robust data storage and goes beyond by reasoning over interactions to construct rich psychological profiles of users and agents. This enables developers to create highly personalized experiences, agents with social cognition, evolving identities, and complex multi-agent systems.

How It Works

The core of Honcho is a peer-based model, treating both users and AI agents as unified "peers." It splits functionality into Storage and Insights services. Interactions are stored, and asynchronous background workers (derivers) process this data to update theory-of-mind representations, generate session summaries, and build comprehensive psychological models. This allows agents to access deep context and personalized insights, facilitating sophisticated social dynamics and evolving identities.

Quick Start & Requirements

Install via pip: pip install honcho-ai. Requires Python >= 3.9 and uv >= 0.4.9. Local development necessitates PostgreSQL with pgvector, and LLM API keys (Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq). A demo environment is available at demo.honcho.dev. Production use requires signing up at app.honcho.dev for a dedicated instance. Local setup involves cloning, dependency installation (uv sync), database setup, environment variable configuration, migrations (alembic upgrade head), and running the API/worker processes.

Highlighted Details

• Theory-of-Mind System: Extracts facts from interactions to build detailed psychological models of peers.
• Dialectic API: Offers a natural language interface to query peer insights, hydrate prompts, and receive personalized responses.
• Peer-Centric Architecture: A unified model for representing and interacting with both human users and AI agents.
• Scalable Design: Built to scale from single-user applications to large multi-agent systems.
• Multi-Provider Support: Configurable LLM providers for various reasoning and generation tasks.

Maintenance & Community

The project provides a "Contributing Guide" for development processes. Specific community channels (e.g., Discord, Slack) or notable contributors are not detailed in the provided README excerpt.

Licensing & Compatibility

Honcho is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 License. This strong copyleft license may impose significant obligations for derivative works and integration into proprietary software, requiring careful legal review for commercial applications.

Limitations & Caveats

The local development setup guide notes potential compatibility issues on platforms other than M3 Macbook Pro. The demo environment is explicitly stated to have no SLA and is for testing purposes only. The AGPL-3.0 license itself is a significant consideration for adoption, particularly in commercial or closed-source contexts.