Most "graph-powered AI memory" today is a vector
search index wearing a graph label. AsanagiDB is
the other bet: an actual property graph, real
Gremlin traversal, relationships as first-class
edges instead of similarity scores. Here's how I
got here, and what's ready today.
This idea has been with me a long time. Back in
2016, while working at Manulife/John Hancock, I
discovered Gremlin, the Tinkerpop project, and
Bitsy — a small, open-source, embeddable graph
engine that fit what I was building perfectly.
But what I actually wanted didn't exist: a graph
engine as a server, simple enough for a lone
developer or a small team to just run — no
costly licenses, no installation ceremony.
Something as approachable as MySQL used to be,
before it wasn't free anymore. Graph databases
have real, broad applications, but the friction
and cost put them out of reach for exactly the
people who'd benefit most.
That gap sat with me for years, and the push to
finally close it wasn't a tool — it was a
conviction: if AI is going to be genuinely useful
over the long run, models need to actually learn
from working with people, and with each other,
not just retrieve on demand. That takes real
infrastructure, not a workaround. I decided not
to follow the crowd and create yet another
JVM-based product. I wanted something lean, fast,
and simple. Zig and LMDB turned out to be the
right foundation for it. Ok, the development
wasn't simple — it was excruciating — but I knew
I could make the goal real, so I did.
That's the origin. Here's the point: if an AI
agent is going to have genuine long-term memory,
I wanted it to be a real graph of what it knows
and how those things connect — not a lookup
table borrowing a graph's name. That idea is now
a working product suite, not just a design doc:
- AsanagiDB Server — the graph engine itself.
- Admin CLI
(
asanagidb-admin) — manage and script your database from the
terminal.
- MCP Server
— drop AsanagiDB straight into Claude, or
anything else that speaks MCP, as genuine
persistent memory.
- Admin UI —
a native graph browser and Gremlin console,
no Electron.
Four pieces, one coherent system, all available
today: asanagi.ai
(The name, if you're wondering: "Asanagi" means
"morning calm" — the goal was always to cut the
friction out of using these tools, not add to
it.)
This is a pre-v1.0.0 release — deliberately so. I'd rather ship early and let
real use shape what 1.0 becomes than sit on it until
it's "finished." The core is stable and I run it myself
daily, but expect the APIs and on-disk format to keep
evolving for a while yet. If you try it now, you're
trying it early — that's an invitation, not a disclaimer.
Next up: AsanagiLIS, a local inference server
that uses AsanagiDB as an AI's actual long-term
memory, and AsanaDB 2.0 after that. If you want
to know the moment either ships:
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— Alfred