What you're actually choosing between.
Your AI conversations are already on your disk, in six different formats. The question is not whether to keep them, it is how you get back to them. There are three honest answers, and Inventory is only the right one for some people.
| Capability | Inventory | Each tool's own history | Cloud AI memory |
|---|---|---|---|
| Searches across every tool at once | yes6 tools | noone tool only | yes |
| Knows who said what | yes | yes | yes |
| Finds it when you can't recall the words | yeskeyword + meaning | nokeyword only | yes |
| Reads history from before you installed it | yesall of it | yes | nofrom setup onward |
| Nothing leaves your machine | yesno account | partlyvaries by tool | nouploaded by design |
| Works with no network | yes | partly | no |
| Survives a tool changing its storage format | yesfreezes, and says so | yes | partly |
| Cost | yes$19.99 once | yesfree | nomonthly |
● yes · ◐ partly · ○ no. Cloud AI memory covers hosted services that sync context between tools through an account. They solve a different problem well; the trade is that your conversations sit on someone else's server.
The history is not in one place, and it is not in one shape.
Claude Code writes JSONL per project. Codex keeps session files. Cursor buries chat in a multi-gigabyte SQLite key/value store. Zed and Kiro each do something else again, and Antigravity keeps two stores where only one is readable. Every one of these is a private format with no stability promise, which is most of the work.
- Cursor14,448
- Claude Code5,506
- Zed190
- Codex316
- Antigravity947
- Kiro365
Messages indexed per tool, from the developer's own machine on 4 August 2026. Yours will look nothing like this, and that is the point: whichever tool dominates for you, the other five still hold work you will want back.
You already know whether you need this.
You use more than one AI coding tool
Cursor at work, Claude Code in the terminal, Codex or Zed for something else. The answer you need is always in whichever one you are not currently in.
You solve the same problem twice
You worked out the fix for that build error, that migration, that config. Months later it happens again and the reasoning is gone, so you re-derive it from scratch.
Your conversations contain client or employer context
Which rules out uploading them to a hosted service, whatever its privacy policy says. Local-only is not a preference here, it is the requirement.
You remember the shape, not the words
You know you discussed a pod stuck terminating on a finaliser. You cannot remember one exact phrase from it, which is all keyword search can use.
- You want your AI to remember for you. Inventory searches what you have already said. It does not feed context back into your tools. If that is what you are after, a memory layer is the right category, and it is not this.
- You need it on Windows or Linux. macOS on Apple Silicon only today. The Windows source exists and has never been run.
- You want your history on your phone. Local means local. There is no sync, and adding one would break the only promise this app makes.
- You only use one tool, and rarely look back. That tool's own history is free and will do.
Still the right fit? Get Inventory — one payment, no account, and it indexes everything already on your disk the first time you open it.