# Two Kinds of Memory > Source: > Published: 2026-09-07 19:16:59+00:00 I asked my AI agent where the retry logic lived. Four seconds later: three files, one shared helper, a comment linking to a Slack thread that doesn't exist anymore. Found it cleanly. Then I asked why the retry count was capped at three instead of five. Silence, then a guess. It could find the code. It had no idea why the code said what it said. Two failures wearing the same complaint — "the AI doesn't know this project." One's a search problem. The other's a memory problem. I'd already fixed the memory one; that's what this whole series has been about. The search problem needed a genuinely different tool. kms only knows what someone deliberately wrote down as a decision, fact, or guardrail. Curated, citable, checkable — `query` answers "why does this work this way" with a real citation, because the answer is sitting in a file someone wrote on purpose. Most of a codebase isn't a decision, though. It's just code — functions, old comments, a README paragraph, a PR nobody formalized because it never rose to that level. kms has nothing to say about any of it. Not broken. Never the job. `virage` is a separate vivantel tool for exactly that gap — a git-aware pipeline that turns a codebase and its docs into a searchable vector index. ``` virage init virage index virage query "how does authentication work?" ``` `init` writes `virage.config.json` via an interactive wizard. `index` chunks the repo — AST-aware, so a function stays one semantic unit instead of getting sliced at an arbitrary line count — and embeds it. `query` searches by meaning, not keyword: ask about authentication and it finds the relevant code even if that word never appears in it — something grep structurally can't do. Every stage is swappable: an OpenAI-compatible embedder or a fully local ONNX model, an embedded file-based vector store for a solo repo or Postgres/Qdrant for a team, an optional reranker on top. Same CLI regardless of what's behind it. "AI memory" tools promising a single system for this exist — Mem0, Letta, Cognee, and similar. They solve a third, different problem: raw recall of accumulated facts or conversation history, closer to virage's mechanism than kms's, but aimed at remembering what happened, not retrieving a curated decision a human stood behind. None separate "a fact" from "a commitment the team made" the way kms does, and none are built for a git repo's own structure the way virage is. An earlier piece in this project's kms series described a real mess: auth split across three places, nobody could say why. `virage index` finds all three in seconds — every file touching auth, ranked by relevance, whether or not "auth" shows up in a variable name. Search problem, solved. It can't tell you *why* it's split three ways. That answer, if it exists, lives in a decision someone wrote down — the kind `bootstrap`'s gap-fill mode goes looking for, or `query` retrieves with a citation once it's captured. `virage` has no opinion on that question. Never asked one. Neither tool is weaker — they answer different questions, *where is this* and `virage query` for "where"/"what" questions. `kms query` for "why" questions. They're two separate tools today, not one integrated system — running `virage` doesn't feed `kms`'s decisions, and vice versa. Worth saying plainly rather than implying a seamlessness that isn't there. What they share is a practice, not a product: don't let either kind of memory live only in someone's head. If this is useful, a star helps other developers find both: **⭐ [Star vivantel/kms](https://github.com/vivantel/kms)** · **⭐ [Star vivantel/virage](https://github.com/vivantel/virage)** ``` /plugin marketplace add vivantel/kms /plugin install kms ``` That's Claude Code. Codex reads the same skill set through its own plugin manifest. Kilo Code CLI reads it too, once `kilo.jsonc` points at the published skills manifest. ``` npm install -g @vivantel/virage virage init ``` Claude Code again first, via virage's own agent plugin. GitHub Copilot reads the same index through its own agent plugin. Codex reads it through its own agent plugin. Antigravity reads it through its own integration. If you already run kms, `virage index` on the same repo takes about a minute and costs nothing to try. If you run neither yet, start with whichever question you actually have: something you can't find, or something you can't explain.