---
title: Nessie
summary: Nessie is an AI-conversation memory layer that auto-syncs chats across tools and structures them into queryable context for humans and agents.
topics: [product-positioning, competitive-research]
sources:
  - id: nessie-home
    type: web
    url: https://nessielabs.com/
    retrieved_at: 2026-06-05
    note: Supports Nessie's public product claims about AI conversation sync, supported tools, agent-queryable context, and local-first storage.
  - id: nessie-yc
    type: web
    url: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nessie
    retrieved_at: 2026-06-05
    note: Supports the company description of Nessie as a shared context layer for users, teams, and agents.
  - id: nessie-beta
    type: web
    url: https://www.beta.nessielabs.com/
    retrieved_at: 2026-06-05
    note: Supports the pricing-decision example and provenance framing from Nessie's earlier public beta copy.
  - id: comparison-session
    type: conversation
    path: /Users/rohan/.codex/sessions/2026/06/05/rollout-2026-06-05T12-51-25-019e9957-24f5-76a3-9494-603f667f2bbf.jsonl
    note: Records the 2026-06-05 comparison that distinguished Nessie's conversation memory from CodeAlmanac's repo-owned engineering memory.
verified: 2026-06-05
---

Nessie is a Mac desktop app and shared context layer for AI-native work. Its public site says it auto-syncs AI conversations across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, and Cowork, then structures those conversations into context that agents can query. The YC profile describes Nessie as a shared context layer for users, teams, and agents, with provenance back to the conversation where a decision happened. [@nessie-home] [@nessie-yc]

The practical job is "make prior AI thinking reusable." A user can ask an agent what the team decided about pricing, and Nessie can search synced conversations, read full threads, and produce a synthesized context with source threads. The public example says a pricing answer can be synthesized from conversations across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. [@nessie-beta]

Nessie is local-first in its public positioning. The site says the user's thinking stays on the device, history is stored on the Mac, login credentials do not leave the machine, and Nessie cannot access private content. This differs from hosted codebase-documentation products such as [[moxie-docs]]. [@nessie-home]

The overlap with CodeAlmanac is the same top-level pain: AI agents forget work between sessions. The difference is the memory unit. Nessie preserves conversations and personal or team thinking across AI tools; CodeAlmanac preserves repo-governed engineering memory as markdown pages, topics, wikilinks, source references, and file-aware retrieval. [@comparison-session]

Nessie competes with CodeAlmanac only when the buyer frames the problem as "my agents need the history of our thinking." It does not replace a repo-owned codebase wiki unless project decisions, invariants, gotchas, and review rules can be reviewed with the code and surfaced by file or topic before edits.

The product lesson is that provenance matters. Nessie's public copy stresses decisions traceable back to source conversations. CodeAlmanac should preserve the stronger repo-native provenance path: page claims tied to source files, PRs, transcripts, and Git-reviewed wiki changes. [@nessie-yc] [@comparison-session]

## Related Pages

[[company-brain]] explains the broader category. [[agentmemory-competitor]] explains a coding-agent memory daemon that is closer to CodeAlmanac's runtime. [[moxie-docs]] explains the hosted codebase-documentation competitor that overlaps more directly with GitHub docs workflows.
