MCP Integration

crossmem exposes two tools via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing AI agents to look up citations and search your wiki without leaving the conversation.

Tools

Tool	Description
`crossmem_cite`	Look up a citation by cite key and return it in a specified format
`crossmem_recall`	Search the wiki for entries matching a query

Setup

Claude Code

claude mcp add crossmem -- crossmem mcp serve

Claude Desktop

Add to ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "crossmem": {
      "command": "crossmem",
      "args": ["mcp", "serve"]
    }
  }
}

Agent usage prompts

Once crossmem is registered as an MCP server, you can ask your agent things like:

“Cite vaswani2017attention in APA format.”
“Give me the BibTeX for vaswani2017attention.”
“What do I have on attention mechanisms?”
“Search my wiki for papers about transformer architectures.”
“Find all papers by Vaswani in my library.”

The MCP server (crossmem mcp serve) runs on stdio. It loads all .md files from ~/crossmem/wiki/ on startup, parses their YAML frontmatter and body, and responds to tool calls by searching this in-memory index.

Logs go to stderr (not stdout), so they don’t interfere with the MCP JSON-RPC transport.

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