reverie history
An honest record of how reverie came together — the first commit, the people who’ve shipped to it, and the inflection points that moved it from sketch to working system.
Origin
Reverie’s first commit landed on 2026-04-04 at 21:22 EDT. The initial scaffold was a two-crate workspace — a daemon skeleton and a benchmark harness — alongside a 36-ticket backlog organised across five milestones. Most of the architectural decisions that define the project today were already named in that backlog; the work since has been pulling them into a system that runs.
Reverie began as a ground-up Rust rewrite of Gentleman-Programming/engram — a Go memory daemon for AI coding agents — and has since transformed into a multi-paradigm memory management engine of its own, with a different data model, a different write path, and a different thesis about where knowledge belongs.
Who’s contributed
Seven humans and four bots have made commits across all branches.
| Author | First commit | Commits | Role |
|---|---|---|---|
| Christian Todie | 2026-04-04 | 958 | Maintainer; primary author. ~92% of commits across three email identities. |
| Aria Pramesi | 2026-04-18 | 260 | Contributor. Burst of work in mid-April; ongoing. |
| Dennis Myshkovskiy | 2026-04-21 | 38 | Contributor. Primary author of the dreamcode Zed fork; contributing to reverie core since April. |
| Courtney Richardson | 2026-07-11 | 10 | Contributor. |
| Kimberley Yoo | 2026-07-01 | 2 | Contributor. |
| Patrick Gray | 2026-04-18 | 2 | Minor contributor. |
| geosmin | 2026-05-07 | 1 | Single-commit contributor. |
| dependabot[bot] | — | 44 | Automation; dependency-update PRs. |
| github-actions[bot] | — | 10 | Automation; release and CI workflows. |
Inflection points
A short list of the moments where the project got meaningfully more capable, or meaningfully
more honest about what it was. Drawn from the changelog and the conventional feat:
commits between releases.
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| 2026-04-04 | First commit. Daemon skeleton, benchmark harness, and a 36-ticket backlog naming the whole system before any of it existed. The shape we are still building toward. |
| 2026-04-10 | v0.3 — multi-factor scoring. Retrieval stops being a single-axis sort. Eight factors — semantic, lexical, recency, resonance, importance, session spread, hippocampal weighting, valence — combine into a ranked result. The first version where the scoring code looks like the architecture diagrams. |
| 2026-04-15 | v0.4 — graph execution. The planner gains conditional routing with cycle guards, flatline detection, and a fan-out queue for parallel work. The point at which reverie’s mesh starts looking like a runtime, not a script. |
| 2026-04-16 | v0.6 — domain model + dream pipeline v2. The store gets a real type system (five traits, a chunk metadata value object, explicit consolidation states), and the consolidation pipeline lands as a structured journal rather than a script. The moment the codebase starts pushing back when you try to do the wrong thing. |
| 2026-04-17 | v0.8 — hybrid search v2. Lexical, dense, sparse, and rerank fused into a single retrieval endpoint. MRR climbs to 0.657 on 812 questions. The numbers stop being a research curiosity and start being a competitive baseline. |
| 2026-04-17 | v0.9 — pseudo-agent epic. Reverie gains the ability to act on its own observations — a small, sandboxed agent with a four-tier permission model and a pinned router prompt. The first time the daemon writes back to the world rather than just watching it. |
| 2026-04-17 | v0.9.3 — contradiction detection. When two observations disagree, both sides get tagged and the conflict feeds the next consolidation pass. Old beliefs are kept, not overwritten, until something newer earns precedence. |
| 2026-04-18 | v0.9.5 — multi-user foundation. A Postgres backend with row-level security, team primitives, and a SQLite-to-Postgres migration path. The shape that lets more than one person share a memory layer without trampling each other. |
| 2026-04-18 | v0.9.7 — coord migration + hybrid search. coord moves from filesystem to Redis-primary (protocol v1.2). FTS5 keyword + sqlite-vec (BGE-large 1024d) + literal token-coverage fused with RRF k=30: MRR 0.628 on 812 questions, R@5 77.0%. The learned-intelligence foundation lands alongside it — access forecasting, Ebbinghaus decay models, attention weights. |
| 2026-05-27 | v0.9.13 — MCP surface + dream output wiring. Native MCP surface
expands to six tools: search_memory, smart_context,
add_observation, add_observation_passive,
dream_status, dream_last_report. ObsidianAdapter wired into
dream sync. Mesh worker HTTP endpoints (/v1/workers/*) ship. Literal
token-coverage signal added to hybrid scoring, moving single-hop MRR delta from
−0.378 to −0.167. |
| 2026-06-03 | v0.9.14 — Substrate tenancy + urgent ops. Completes Phase 2 dream-phase tenancy with orphan garbage collection and Phase 3 view=substrate API surface with origin-aware ranking. Adds observability to dream cycle in-progress phases and fixes CI disk-space failures that were blocking release automation. The point at which the v1.0.0 substrate-tenancy gate moves from blocked to unblocked. |
| 2026-06-10 | v0.10.12 — Domain graph: routing (neuroscience-weighted spreading activation). Completes Phase C of domain-graph categorization substrate with chunk_id→observation_id resolver (C0) and empirical routing-spike gate (C-SPIKE) gating C1+. Spreading-activation routing module seeded by 9-factor scorer; dream edge-trainer and routed_context surface now consumed by Context Lens. The first time domain-graph routing moves beyond categorical metadata into active signal propagation. |
| 2026-06-10 | v0.10.11 — Domain graph: edge surface. Completes Phase B of domain-graph categorization with typed entity↔entity edges (EntityEdge/EdgeKind) and weighted Hebbian obs↔obs associative edges using discrete decay and degree caps. CA3 AssociativeRecall façade inverts distance to similarity; entity-row persistence wiring (B1-pre) lands. The first time the domain graph becomes navigable by relation, not just by entity. |
| 2026-06-10 | v0.10.10 — Domain graph: node surface. Ships Phase A of domain-graph categorization substrate with typed two-level taxonomy (DomainCategory + domain_category column), closed-schema TagFacet value-types, ChunkMetadata activation fields, and VectorHandle—completing the first vertical (domain → store → ingest). Byte-parity preserved; schema design documented in cerebral-work/reverie#560. Builds on v0.10.1 domain-normalization work and establishes the foundation that v0.17.0 value-types will expand. The first time the domain graph surface becomes queryable by category and type. |
| 2026-06-10 | v0.10.0 — Audit-driven cleanup. Executes Tier 0–3 remediation from the 2026-05-22 code-grounded audit: removes unused hexagonal port traits in reverie-domain/traits.rs; consolidates EngramCompatStore (377 imports across 55 files) into a single canonical location; deduplicates core types (Observation, Session, Chunk) scattered across 9 crates. Reduces import surface and strengthens module boundaries ahead of substrate tenancy stabilization. The moment the codebase became honest about what it actually uses. |
| 2026-06-13 | v0.10.3 — Dependency direction & crate coverage. Enforces acyclic dependency graph across 12 crates via cargo-deny and layer-based import rules; eliminates reverse dependencies that violated the domain → store → ingest hierarchy established in v0.10.10. Adds coverage instrumentation to ChunkMetadata and VectorHandle codepaths, exposing 14% untested error paths in ingest-layer serialization. The moment the build graph stopped lying about its actual shape. |
Future work
Sync paused. Future milestones are temporarily unpublished while the Linear-to-site automation is repaired. New entries will return only through a validated, review-gated pull request.
Where it stands
- Version: 0.13.0 (latest tag: v0.13.0). v1.0 targets 2026-09-15 and
gates on multi-user v1, Postgres integration suite green, docs end-to-end, and the M1
findings paper published. Quality bars: core crate coverage ≥ 70%, LoCoMo MRR
≥ 0.657,
/healthgreen 14 + consecutive days. - Scope: a single Rust daemon (
reveried), a benchmark harness, a CLI for multi-agent coordination (cortex), an HTTP and native MCP surface (10 tools), and an ObsidianAdapter for vault sync. - Tracking: all work in Linear under the
CERproject.
License
Proprietary (© 2026 Christian M. Todie / cerebral.work). All rights reserved. The source repository is private; reverie has not been released under any other license. For commercial licensing, embedded use, or evaluation access: [email protected].