Basic Memory gives your AI the ability to save notes, search your knowledge base, and build on what it’s learned over time. That’s powerful on its own.
But there’s a difference between an AI that can do something and one that does it well. Skills close that gap.
A skill is a simple instruction file that teaches your AI the best way to work with Basic Memory. Install it once, and your AI picks up good habits automatically. You don’t have to train it, prompt it, or remind it. It just works better.
What Skills Actually Do
Without skills, your AI saves a note when you ask it to. With skills, it saves the right information, in the right format, with the right connections to everything else you’ve stored — without you having to ask.
The Skills
memory-notes — teaches your AI to write well-structured notes that connect to each other. The foundation.
memory-tasks — tracks multi-step work across sessions. Your AI writes down where it is in a process so it can pick up exactly where it left off next time.
memory-reflect — your AI reviews what you covered and saves the important parts as long-term knowledge. Like a good assistant who writes up notes after a meeting.
memory-schema — keeps your notes consistent over time. If you have a certain type of note you create regularly (tasks, contacts, meetings), this skill makes sure they always follow the same structure.
memory-metadata-search — teaches your AI to search your notes by their labels, not just their content. Find all active tasks. Filter by priority. Pull up everything tagged with a specific project.
memory-research — your AI searches the web and saves its findings as structured notes you can actually use later. Not a summary that disappears — knowledge that sticks.
memory-ingest — paste in a meeting transcript, a document, a conversation log. Your AI turns it into properly organized notes, automatically.
memory-defrag — tidies up your knowledge base. Combines notes that overlap, splits ones that have grown too long, keeps things organized as your collection grows.
memory-lifecycle — manages notes through their natural life: active, completed, archived. Nothing gets deleted — just moved aside when it’s no longer relevant.
Getting Started
Install everything at once:
npx skills add basicmachines-co/basic-memory-skillsOr just the ones you want:
npx skills add basicmachines-co/basic-memory-skills --skill memory-tasksWorks with any agent that supports skills.