Frequently asked questions

Short answers to the questions platform and SRE leads ask first. For deeper detail, see How it works and the Security model.

What is Hindsight?

Hindsight is an open-source, self-hosted operational memory for coding agents. It stores services, runbooks and reviewed incident learnings (clues) as Markdown in git, and serves them to Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI or any MCP client.

Is Hindsight an AI SRE agent?

No. Hindsight never gets paged, runs commands or investigates incidents on its own. It is the knowledge layer underneath the agent each engineer already uses, and an AI SRE agent could be one of its clients.

Which coding agents does Hindsight support?

The installer configures Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Gemini CLI, and any other MCP client can connect over Streamable HTTP or through the stdio proxy. Automatic capture through lifecycle hooks depends on each client's version and hook support; explicit capture through the CLI or the propose_clue MCP tool always works.

Do I need an LLM API key?

No. Capture, review and full-text recall all work without a model. If you configure your own LLM endpoint or a local model, Hindsight uses it to extract candidate clues from session summaries. There is no hosted fallback.

How does Hindsight keep secrets out of the knowledge base?

Captured text is redacted in the agent hook and again on the server before it is written to git, indexed or sent to a model. Tokens, keys, IP addresses, emails and customer IDs become REDACTED markers, and no raw transcript is stored. Redaction is best effort, so reviewers should read the evidence before approving.

Where is the data stored?

In a git repository you control: GitHub, GitLab, Gitea or a bare repo. The server keeps a local clone, commits on each write with the real engineer as author, and pushes on a timer. The search index is SQLite and can be rebuilt from git at any time.

Does Hindsight collect telemetry?

No. Hindsight sends no usage data anywhere, and the web UI loads no external fonts, scripts or analytics.

Can we review clues as pull requests instead of in the UI?

Yes. With REVIEW_MODE=git, captured clues are committed to a proposal branch and you review and merge them with your normal git workflow and branch protection.

How is it licensed?

Hindsight is MIT licensed.

Is this the same project as Vectorize Hindsight?

No. This project is published as hindsight-sre and registers its MCP server as hindsight-sre to avoid colliding with the unrelated Vectorize project of the same name.