Start with one memory your agents can share

Rift runs on your Mac, records the agent sessions you choose, and gives that past work back to any tool that can talk to it. You shouldn’t have to bring the same project back into focus twice.

On this page

What Rift remembers

An agent is the AI tool doing work for you, like Codex, Claude Code, or Cursor. Rift gives those agents one shared memory of your past work, so what you figured out in one tool is there in the next.

New Claude Code and Codex sessions you choose to capture.
Older AI chats you import, or ask me to backfill during the beta.
Decisions, files, commands, and context your connected agents can ask for later.

Install Rift

On an Apple Silicon Mac, download Rift and double-click. Nothing to set up first — the installer bundles everything and opens onboarding for you.

Download Rift for Apple Silicon

Apple Silicon (M1–M4) · macOS 12.3+ · .pkg, ~100 MB. No Node, no terminal — double-click and Rift opens onboarding for you. Intel coming soon.

Prefer the terminal, or on an Intel Mac? Install with one command — run it yourself, or paste it into your agent and ask it to install Rift for you.

$curl -fsSL https://getrift.dev/install | bash

Requires macOS 12.3+, Node 20.19+, npm, git, and Apple Command Line Tools.

Install

Rift creates a local data folder, starts the background service, and keeps private defaults on.

Onboard

Run rift onboard after install. It walks through first-run setup and a recall test. The .pkg opens this for you automatically.

Ask

In a new agent session, ask it to recall prior Rift context before it starts working.

Check it’s running anytime with rift status. Hit a snag during the beta? Tell me what broke at beta@getrift.dev.

Tell your agents to use Rift

The simplest setup is a short instruction in the file your agent already reads. For Codex, use AGENTS.md. For Claude Code, use CLAUDE.md.

Before starting, ask Rift for relevant past context. Use Rift to recall decisions, files, and prior agent sessions that may matter for this task.

Then check the connection from inside your agent. Run /mcp and look for rift. If it is missing, run rift mcp install --client codex, or swap codex for the agent you use.

Find old work without remembering the exact words

Say you ask Codex to pick a billing task back up. Rift hands it the decision you landed on last week and the files you changed, so it keeps going instead of asking you to re-explain the project.

You don’t have to remember how you first wrote something to find it again. Ask for “the billing decision from last week” and Rift finds the session even if nobody used those exact words. Plain keyword search works too. I set this up for you during the beta, so there are no keys to manage and no wiring to think about.

Common setup issues

The installer says Node is missing or too old

Install or update Node with brew install node or brew upgrade node, then run the Rift install command again.

The installer asks for Apple Command Line Tools

Run xcode-select --install. Apple opens a small installer. When it finishes, run the Rift install command again.

Your agent does not show Rift in /mcp

Run rift mcp install --client codex, or use --all to refresh every supported agent connection without reinstalling Rift.

You want older ChatGPT or Claude chats inside Rift

Backfill is real, but during the beta it is a manual step, since I would rather help you through it than ship a brittle importer. Email me at beta@getrift.dev (or reply to the welcome email) and I will get your old chats in.

You did not get the welcome email

You can still use everything here. To reach me, for backfill or anything else, email beta@getrift.dev.

What leaves your Mac

Your archive stays on your Mac. The conversations Rift captures and the memory it builds live there, not on someone else’s server.

For meaning search, the parts of your conversations Rift needs to search, plus the phrase you type, go to Voyage, the search provider connected to your key. That is the one thing that leaves your Mac. Rift does not send your archive to me. The full breakdown, and every other opt-in, is on the privacy page.