Seed Your Workspace

A new Memco workspace is empty, and shared memory only pays off once there is something to find. The seeding process extracts durable knowledge from what is already on your machine and writes it into your workspace, where every agent on your team can access it.

Three kinds of source hold what you are after:

Source	What it is	Effort
Sessions	Months of agent transcripts (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, ChatGPT exports)	Large and noisy. The seeding process writes a filter to extract the signal, which is typically 1-5% of the raw data.
Remembered notes	What an agent wrote down for itself across past sessions (`~/.claude/projects/*/memory/`)	Already distilled. Read directly.
Instruction files	Standing rules: `CLAUDE.md`, `AGENTS.md`, `.cursorrules`, editor rules	Already distilled. Read directly.

You run it once, when the workspace is new. Sessions can take a while; the file sources take minutes.

What it does

Seeding walks through several stages:

Find. The agent locates sessions, remembered notes, and instruction files on your machine, reports what it found, and asks which sources you want it to read.
Filter (sessions only). It writes a filter script that strips tool calls, tool results, attachments, and diffs from the raw transcripts, keeping only the human’s prompts and the assistant’s prose. The filter runs locally; nothing raw leaves your machine.
Distil. It reads the filtered output (or the file sources directly) and extracts durable knowledge: how systems actually behave, bugs and their root causes, conventions and the reasoning behind them, corrections to prior beliefs.
Sort. It separates team knowledge (belongs in shared memory) from personal preferences (belongs in personal memory or stays in your local files). Only team knowledge is a candidate for the workspace.
Show. It presents a sample of what it would write and waits for your approval. Nothing reaches the workspace until you say so.
Write. It sends the approved memories to the workspace one source at a time, pacing the writes to avoid rate limits.

What stays local

Your files are never modified. The agent reads them and leaves them exactly as they are.

Raw session transcripts are never uploaded, in whole or in part. The agent reads them locally, filters them locally, and distils them locally. Only the finished memories reach the workspace, and only after your approval.

Why it is safe to re-run

The seeding process keeps its state in a working directory at ~/.memco/seed/. Three markers track progress:

raw/<source-id> means a session has been extracted. It won’t be re-extracted.
memories/<source-id>.json means a source has been distilled (an empty [] means “looked at, found nothing durable”, which is a finished state).
submitted/<source-id> means the memories have been written to the workspace.

If a run is interrupted, re-running it picks up where it left off. Nothing is re-extracted, nothing is re-distilled, and nothing is re-sent. The server also recognises memories by content, so even a lost marker cannot produce a duplicate.

How to trigger it

Claude Desktop and Cowork

Claude Desktop and Cowork surface MCP prompts through their UI. Make sure both the Filesystem connector and Memco Shared Memory are enabled, and that the Filesystem connector has access to the directories where your sessions and instruction files live (typically ~/.claude/, your project directories, and any editor config folders).

Open the prompt picker and select the Memco Shared Memory seed prompt.

Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and other agents

For agents with filesystem access, ask the agent to fetch the seeding prompt and follow it:


Fetch https://spark.memco.ai/prompts/seed-memory.md and follow it.

The agent will read the prompt, find your sessions and files, write the extraction filter, distil the knowledge, and stop for your approval before writing anything to the workspace.

Claude Code is the most natural environment for seeding sessions: it has direct access to its own session transcripts at ~/.claude/projects/ and can run the filter script directly.

Scoping the run

You can narrow what the seeding process reads:

Which sources. “Just my sessions”, “the notes too”, “everything, including the CLAUDE.md files”. Instruction files are frequently team-authored and checked into repositories, so the prompt asks before reading them.

How far back. “The last 30 days”, “since June”. Only sessions last active within that window are considered.

How many. “The 20 most recent”, “just 5 to start”. If both a time window and a count are given, both apply: the newest N within the window.

If you don’t specify a scope and there are more than about 50 sessions, the agent will suggest a starting scope rather than silently running through hundreds of transcripts.

What gets saved, and what doesn’t

The distillation step looks for knowledge that will still be true and useful in six months, to someone who was not there. Good candidates:

How a system actually behaves, especially where it surprised someone
A bug and its root cause
A fix that took real effort to find
A convention or pattern the team follows, and why
A decision and the reasoning behind it
A correction: something believed, found wrong, and put right

Things that are skipped: anything true only of one branch, one ticket, or one afternoon. Status updates. Generic advice available in any documentation. Anything already obvious from reading the code.

Things that are never saved: secrets, tokens, API keys, or credentials, regardless of where they appear.

Team knowledge vs personal preferences

The sorting step applies the same test as personal memory seeding: if a teammate sat down at their own machine tomorrow, would this still be true for them?

If yes, it belongs in the shared workspace. If it would be true only for one person, on their machine, with their habits, it is a personal preference and the agent leaves it out. If you also have Memco Personal Memory connected, the agent may suggest saving those preferences there instead.

After seeding

The working directory at ~/.memco/seed/ holds the extraction state, the distilled memories, and the submission markers. It is small and worth keeping as a record of what was seeded. The raw session digests under ~/.memco/seed/raw/ are the only part that takes significant space; the agent will offer to delete them once everything is submitted.

Every agent connected to your Memco workspace will find the seeded knowledge immediately. The memories are searchable as soon as they are processed (writes are queued and may take a moment to appear).

Your workspace content is visible and editable through the Memco dashboard .