Bring Your Own Agent, Keep Your Context

What it does

OpenContext acts as a global, personal knowledge base for AI coding assistants. It stores project background, decisions, and documentation in a searchable library that persists across repositories and chat sessions. Instead of spawning yet another agent subscription, it wraps your existing Codex, Claude Code, or Cursor CLI with skills, slash commands, and an MCP server so the agent can read and write context before it starts coding.

The interesting bit

The project treats your agent’s memory as a system-level concern rather than a chat-level one. By generating user-level skills and slash commands via oc init, it effectively turns your existing CLI into a context-aware librarian that loads history before acting and persists lessons after shipping.

Key highlights

• Reuses your existing agent CLI—no separate AI subscription required
• Provides both a native desktop app and a local web UI for browsing and editing context
• Exposes an MCP server so Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex can call OpenContext as native tools
• Generates user-level skills and slash commands (/opencontext-search, /opencontext-create) during initialization
• Maintains a global contexts/ library that works across all projects and agents

Verdict

Grab it if you switch between Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex and want project context to follow you across repos and sessions. Skip it if a single chat thread is all you ever need.