A User Built an Obsidian Plugin That Turns Your Engram Memories Into a Knowledge Graph

Last week an email landed in our inbox from Douglas Ferrell, an Engram user, with a one-line pitch and a GitHub link:

“Had Claude make a thing maybe useful for people wanting to visualize the memories in Engram.”

The “thing” is Engram Vault, an Obsidian plugin that mirrors your Engram memories into your vault as real markdown notes — searchable, taggable, and, best of all, graphable. Your AI conversations become a knowledge graph you can walk. We had nothing to do with it, and it's one of the best demonstrations of what Engram is for that we've seen.

What it does

Point the plugin at your Engram API key and run a sync. Every conversation in your memory becomes an Obsidian note: frontmatter with the Engram id, tags, and dates; each message rendered as a role-styled callout. Notes file themselves into folders by tag, and auto-generated hub pages wikilink everything together — so Obsidian's graph view clusters your memories by topic. Months of AI conversations, laid out as a map.

Search is wired to Engram's own semantic search: a command palette modal queries /api/v1/search, and Enter jumps you to the matching note. There's even a limited write path — append a note to a memory, or delete one (with confirmation) — without leaving Obsidian.

The details worth stealing

What impressed us is the engineering care in a first release:

• Incremental sync — only changed conversations are re-fetched, so re-syncing a big memory is cheap.
• Your local edits are protected— the plugin hashes note content, and if you've hand-edited a note it skips it with a warning instead of overwriting your work.
• Deletes are archived, not destroyed — memories removed remotely get moved aside locally, never silently vaporized. Very much our philosophy.
• Testable by design — the markdown renderer is deliberately free of Obsidian imports so it runs under plain node in unit tests.

Built on the public API

Engram Vault uses the same REST API available on every plan — the plugin asks for an API key from your dashboard and talks to the same endpoints your agents do. No special access, no partnership, no heads-up to us. That's the point of having a real API: the integrations we'd never think to build show up on their own.

And in a detail we can't resist: Douglas built it with Claude. An AI helped write the tool that visualizes the memory of AIs. We live in interesting times.

His feature request shipped

Douglas's email included one honest limitation: the plugin couldn't edit a memory, because Engram's API had append and delete but no update endpoint. It was a fair ask made concrete by working code — so we built it. As of today the update API is live: message content can be corrected in place, and the search index rebuilds so recall stays consistent with what you actually stored. A community plugin moved our roadmap in a week. Building in public works in both directions.

Try it

The plugin is MIT-licensed on GitHub: f3rr311/obsidian-engram-vault. It's not in Obsidian's community directory yet, so installation is manual — copy the plugin files into your vault, paste your API key, sync. The README covers it in four steps.

And if you build something on Engram — a plugin, a workflow, a weird experiment — tell us. We'll happily point people at it, exactly like this.