What's shipping.

Most "graph-powered AI memory" today is a vector search index wearing a graph label. AsanagiDB is the other bet: an actual property graph, real Gremlin traversal, relationships as first-class edges instead of similarity scores. Here's how I got here, and what's ready today.

This idea has been with me a long time. Back in 2016, while working at Manulife/John Hancock, I discovered Gremlin, the Tinkerpop project, and Bitsy — a small, open-source, embeddable graph engine that fit what I was building perfectly. But what I actually wanted didn't exist: a graph engine as a server, simple enough for a lone developer or a small team to just run — no costly licenses, no installation ceremony. Something as approachable as MySQL used to be, before it wasn't free anymore. Graph databases have real, broad applications, but the friction and cost put them out of reach for exactly the people who'd benefit most.

That gap sat with me for years, and the push to finally close it wasn't a tool — it was a conviction: if AI is going to be genuinely useful over the long run, models need to actually learn from working with people, and with each other, not just retrieve on demand. That takes real infrastructure, not a workaround. I decided not to follow the crowd and create yet another JVM-based product. I wanted something lean, fast, and simple. Zig and LMDB turned out to be the right foundation for it. Ok, the development wasn't simple — it was excruciating — but I knew I could make the goal real, so I did.

That's the origin. Here's the point: if an AI agent is going to have genuine long-term memory, I wanted it to be a real graph of what it knows and how those things connect — not a lookup table borrowing a graph's name. That idea is now a working product suite, not just a design doc:

• AsanagiDB Server — the graph engine itself.
• Admin CLI (asanagidb-admin) — manage and script your database from the terminal.
• MCP Server — drop AsanagiDB straight into Claude, or anything else that speaks MCP, as genuine persistent memory.
• Admin UI — a native graph browser and Gremlin console, no Electron.

Four pieces, one coherent system, all available today: asanagi.ai

(The name, if you're wondering: "Asanagi" means "morning calm" — the goal was always to cut the friction out of using these tools, not add to it.)

This is a pre-v1.0.0 release — deliberately so. I'd rather ship early and let real use shape what 1.0 becomes than sit on it until it's "finished." The core is stable and I run it myself daily, but expect the APIs and on-disk format to keep evolving for a while yet. If you try it now, you're trying it early — that's an invitation, not a disclaimer.

Next up: AsanagiLIS, a local inference server that uses AsanagiDB as an AI's actual long-term memory, and AsanaDB 2.0 after that. If you want to know the moment either ships:

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— Alfred