Zed Persistent Memory — Never Explain Your Stack Again

Why Zed forgets — and why that costs you

Zed's AI assistant operates within a context window. When you close the editor, switch projects, or start a new session, everything is gone. No memory of:

• ✗Your architectural decisions and the reasoning behind them
• ✗Bugs you spent hours fixing last week
• ✗Your team's naming conventions and code style decisions
• ✗Which third-party libraries have known issues in your stack
• ✗What the codebase looked like before the last major refactor

Every session is a clean slate. You spend the first minutes re-explaining context instead of writing code.

The fix: cachly MCP server

cachly connects to Zed via MCP (Model Context Protocol), which Zed supports natively as "context servers." Once connected, Zed's AI has access to 89 memory tools that give it permanent, cross-session recall — automatically.

Setup: one command, 30 seconds

npx @cachly-dev/mcp-server@latest setup

The wizard auto-detects Zed and writes the correct MCP config to ~/.config/zed/settings.json. One browser click to sign in. No API keys to manage:

// ~/.config/zed/settings.json (or .zed/settings.json in project root)
{
  "context_servers": {
    "cachly": {
      "command": {
        "path": "npx",
        "args": ["-y", "@cachly-dev/mcp-server@latest"],
        "env": {
          "CACHLY_JWT": "your-token-here"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

Zed uses context_servers instead of mcpServers — the setup wizard writes the right format automatically. If you also use Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf, the wizard configures all of them in the same pass.

brain_from_git: context before session one

After setup, cachly automatically runs brain_from_git — it reads your entire git history and loads the lessons into your Brain:

# What brain_from_git extracts from your git log:
✓ Fix: JWT expiry check before signature validation (commit a3f91c2)
✓ Revert: Redis pub/sub removed — race condition at scale (commit 8b2e441)
✓ Decision: tRPC over REST — type safety across monorepo (commit f9c1203)
✓ Warning: Stripe webhook order not guaranteed — always idempotent

Zed arrives at your first session already knowing years of your team's decisions — without you writing a single documentation line.

What a session looks like with cachly

Open Zed. On the first AI assistant call, smart_recall fires automatically:

> Good morning. Here's what I remember:
>
> Last session: payments refactor — stripe-webhook.ts
> Team learned: always set idempotency_key for Stripe charges
>   → commit a3f91c2, 2025-11-14
>
> brain_predict: ⚠️ Moderate deploy risk
> The k8s namespace change in PR #441 matches a past
> race condition pattern (incident 2024-08-12).

No prompting. No manual context. Zed just knows.

cachly works across all your editors

One Brain, shared across every tool in your workflow:

Run the setup once — cachly configures all detected editors automatically. Switch between editors without losing any context.