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MIP: Memory Interoperability Protocol

A portable, user-owned memory.json standard any AI app can read.

Simplified Chinese | English

MIP poster

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Why MIP exists

AI tools are getting better at remembering you.

That memory is usually trapped inside each product.

You teach ChatGPT your preferences. Switch to Claude or a local agent, and you start over. Switch back three months later, and the old product may remember an outdated version of you.

MIP is a small open convention that fixes the portability layer:

Keep one local file at ~/.mip/memory.json. Any AI product can read it to understand you.

No daemon. No hosted service. No database. Just a file.

What MIP is

MIP v0.1 is a minimal standard for explicit user memory:

  • identity
  • preferences
  • custom user-defined fields

It is intentionally small. The goal is not to solve all memory problems in v0.1. The goal is to create a stable portability baseline that tools can adopt quickly.

What MIP is not

  • Not a memory product like Mem0 or Letta
  • Not a hosted profile sync service
  • Not a replacement for tool-specific rules like .cursorrules or CLAUDE.md

Those are implementations or product-specific conventions. MIP is the shared format.

Quick example

// ~/.mip/memory.json
{
  "$schema": "https://mip-protocol.org/v0.1/schema.json",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "identity": {
    "name": "Jane",
    "language": "en-US",
    "role": "Frontend Engineer",
    "tech_stack": ["React", "TypeScript", "Next.js"]
  },
  "preferences": {
    "response_style": "concise",
    "formality": "casual",
    "code_comments_language": "zh-CN",
    "variable_names_language": "en"
  },
  "custom": {
    "editor": "VS Code",
    "interests": ["AI", "Web3", "Design"]
  }
}

Read it in 3 lines

Python

import json, pathlib
path = pathlib.Path.home() / ".mip" / "memory.json"
memory = json.loads(path.read_text()) if path.exists() else {}

JavaScript

import { readFileSync, existsSync } from "fs";
import { homedir } from "os";
const path = `${homedir()}/.mip/memory.json`;
const memory = existsSync(path) ? JSON.parse(readFileSync(path, "utf-8")) : {};

Why this matters

  • User-owned: your memory lives on your machine, not only inside one vendor
  • Portable: multiple AI tools can read the same profile
  • Simple: adoption cost is extremely low
  • Forward-compatible: future versions can add richer memory layers without breaking v0.1

Think of it as .editorconfig for AI memory.

Adoption paths

The easiest tools to support MIP are:

  1. IDE agents and local coding tools
  2. Open-source AI clients
  3. MCP-enabled apps
  4. Local model runtimes and wrappers

These tools already run on your machine and can read local files with almost no integration cost.

MIP and MCP

MCP and MIP solve different problems:

  • MCP answers: what tools can the AI use?
  • MIP answers: who is the user?

MIP can work without MCP. For MCP-enabled apps, MIP can also be exposed through the included proof-of-concept server in mcp-server/.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "mip": {
      "command": "node",
      "args": ["path/to/mip-server/index.js"]
    }
  }
}

Repository contents

Roadmap

Version Focus
v0.1 Single local file, explicit user memory, read-mostly
v0.2 Behavioral patterns layer
v0.3 Permissions and visibility controls
v0.4 Local runtime daemon
v0.5 Encrypted cross-device sync
v1.0 Full specification

Contributing

MIP is early. The best contributions right now are:

  • Implement read support in AI tools
  • Review the RFC and schema
  • Build adapters for MCP clients
  • Challenge the model and point out edge cases

Open an issue if you want to discuss adoption, semantics, or implementation details.

License

CC-BY-SA 4.0