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Le Sanctum

2026-08-05: The Vault Across the Wire

A thick archival ledger open on a dark desk, with a single glowing teal filament stretching from its pages across a dark gap to a small laptop silhouette — knowledge travels the wire, not a local copy.

An agent that cannot read the Memory Vault will invent meanings for words the haus already defined. EETISMAD is the standing example: three letters into the conversation and the session is already guessing, while the definition sits in Engineering Discipline and a dozen closeout notes on the Mini.

The satellite MacBook does not hold that vault. Its ~/.sanctum/memory is an events mirror. The authoritative tree — thousands of notes, inboxes, knowledge, archives — lives on the Mini. Claude already knew this. Grok’s MCP list did not.

What was missing

Section titled “What was missing”

Grok’s ~/.grok/config.toml had zero MCP servers configured by hand. Plugin servers arrived (Cloudflare, Vercel, Hugging Face, iMessage). The Memory Vault did not. Tool search for vault returned nothing. The session could still SSH and run vault.sh, which is fine until you want the model to treat search and read as first-class tools instead of a ritual you have to remember to invoke.

The Rust server already existed: memory-vault-mcp on the Mini, stdio transport, FTS5-backed tools (memory_search, memory_read, memory_write, memory_list, memory_delete, memory_links, memory_consolidate, memory_health). Claude’s settings pointed at a binary path that was not even present on the satellite. Nobody had wired the hop.

The bridge shape

Section titled “The bridge shape”

The durable piece is a thin wrapper in the MBP config repo — the same durability rule that refuses orphan scripts in ~/.local/bin:

Terminal window
# ~/.sanctum-mbp/bin/grok-memory-vault-mcp.sh (concept)
# stdio stays clean: ssh -T, no TTY, remote env points at the Mini vault
exec ssh -T -o BatchMode=yes \
  [email protected] \
  "env MEMORY_VAULT_DIR=/Users/neo/.sanctum/memory /Users/neo/Projects/sanctum-rs/target/release/memory-vault-mcp"

Grok config:

[mcp_servers.memory-vault]
startup_timeout_sec = 120
command = "/Users/neo/.sanctum-mbp/bin/grok-memory-vault-mcp.sh"
enabled = true

startup_timeout_sec = 120 is not superstition. A cold start that finds an empty or rotated index reindexes the whole vault before it answers initialize. Eight thousand notes is real wall clock.

The index that would not open

Section titled “The index that would not open”

The first handshake failed for a boring reason that had been recurring for months: ~/.sanctum/memory/.vault.db was a 4 KiB SQLite stub with a dead WAL, integrity check failing, open returning disk I/O error. A stack of .vault.db.stale-* files told the same story in the directory listing.

Rotate the stub aside, drop the orphan -wal/-shm, let the server recreate and reindex. One cold start later: forty megabytes of index, 8457 notes, grok mcp doctor memory-vault green — command found, handshake OK, eight tools discovered.

Session attach is not config

Section titled “Session attach is not config”

Grok attaches MCP servers at session start. Adding a healthy server mid-session does not put tools into the running turn. grok mcp doctor can pass while the active chat still has no memory_search. The operator action is a restart — the same class of truth as verifying a process start time after a git pull.

What EETISMAD looks like here

Section titled “What EETISMAD looks like here”
GateEvidence
Everything E2E Testedgrok mcp doctor memory-vault handshake + tools list; initialize over the wrapper returns protocol 2024-11-05
in Sanctum-docsThis field note + sidebar entry
Mergedsanctum-mbp wrapper on origin/main; Grok user config points at that path
And DeployedWrapper executable on the satellite PATH of record; Mini index rebuilt; doctor green from the satellite

Jocasta MCP remains the local-first archivist for on-disk macOS databases. The Memory Vault is the haus’s shared markdown memory. They are different seats. This bridge only makes the second one reachable from a satellite agent that previously had to invent EETISMAD from first principles — the same bar that governs ds4max and the same-day restore that finally rang on Signal.

Section titled “Related”