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Smithers memory works out of the box: facts and notes persist across runs in local SQLite with keyword recall, no setup at all. Connecting Hindsight upgrades that to semantic memory: recall by meaning instead of keywords, mental-model primers, and retention policies. Getting a Hindsight endpoint means creating an account or deploying a service, and that is a human task: your agent cannot sign up for you. This page is where HINDSIGHT_URL comes from.

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Option A: Hindsight Cloud

  1. Sign up at ui.hindsight.vectorize.io/signup.
  2. Copy your workspace’s API base URL and API key from the Hindsight console.

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Option B: Self-host

Run Hindsight yourself with Docker (it bundles its own Postgres; bring an LLM provider key for its extraction models):
Your API base URL is http://127.0.0.1:8888 (the web UI is on port 9999). Helm and pip installs are covered in Hindsight’s own docs.

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Point Smithers at it

Set the environment where Smithers runs (shell profile, .env, or your deployment’s config):
That’s the whole switch: with HINDSIGHT_URL set, every workflow using memory gets semantic recall; unset it and Smithers falls back to local SQLite memory, losing nothing that was stored locally.

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Check it worked

Ask your agent:
“Run a Smithers workflow that remembers something about this project, then ask memory what it knows.”
Then, in a later session:
“What has Smithers learned about this repo across runs?”
The agent-facing details (banks, tags, recall budgets, the <Memory> component, createHindsightMemoryStore) live in the Technical API at Memory and the Memory API. You don’t need them; your agent does.