Tool Attribution

A Memanto session belongs to an agent, but the calls inside it come from a tool — Claude Code, Cursor, Codex CLI, an MCP client, or a plain shell. Attribution is what records which tool made each call, so a session can show who took part in it and the dashboard can show which tools are connected right now. This is machine-facing plumbing. Nothing here changes what a person types by hand.

How Memanto identifies the caller

Identity is resolved in this order, best first:

The tool names itself. --tool on reads, --source on writes, or the X-Memanto-Client header over HTTP. Exact.
MEMANTO_CLIENT in the environment. Set by a wrapper that knows who it is.
MCP clientInfo. Read from the initialize handshake, so an MCP client is identified without any flag.
Environment markers. Variables a tool happens to leave behind (CLAUDECODE, CURSOR_TRACE_ID, and similar). Reliable when present, absent for some tools.
Unidentified. Recorded as unknown rather than guessed at.

Detection is deliberately conservative: a marker has to be specific to one tool before Memanto maps it. Attributing a call to the wrong tool is worse than attributing it to nobody, because the Connections view reads these labels back as fact.

Declaring the tool

Reads
Writes
HTTP

recall and answer carry no --source, so they take --tool:

memanto recall "auth approach" --limit 10 --tool cursor
memanto recall --recent --limit 10 --tool cursor
memanto answer "What did we decide about auth?" --tool cursor

remember already names the writer with --source, and that doubles as the calling tool. There is no --tool on remember:

memanto remember "Chose Postgres for the metadata store" \
  --type decision --confidence 0.95 --provenance inferred \
  --source cursor

--source user, agent, and human name a person rather than a tool, so they do not claim a connection. Memanto falls back to environment detection for those.

REST callers identify themselves with headers:

X-Memanto-Client: cursor
X-Memanto-Project: /path/to/repo   # optional

The session comes from the session token, not from a header. A request with no X-Memanto-Client is recorded as unknown — it is never attributed to whatever process happens to be running the server.

--tool is hidden from --help because it exists for agents, not people. It accepts any slug; values are normalized to lowercase (Claude Code becomes claude-code), and the connect slugs are the canonical set.

Running memanto connect <agent> writes a skill and instruction file that already carry that agent’s own slug on every example command, so a connected tool identifies itself without any extra setup. If you connected before this shipped, re-run memanto connect <agent> to pick it up.

What gets recorded

Each memory operation appends one line to a local activity log at ~/.memanto/activity/events-YYYY-MM-DD.jsonl:

{"ts": "2026-09-09T19:47:12+00:00", "tool": "cursor", "display": "Cursor",
 "session": "sess_dc8007cbb863", "agent_id": "my-agent",
 "project_dir": "/path/to/repo", "op": "recall", "n": 5}

It records the operation and a count — never memory content. Files older than 30 days are pruned automatically. Logging is best effort: a failure to write this line never fails the memory operation behind it.

Where it shows up

The dashboard Connections page reads this log:

Connected tools — a diagram of each tool joined to Memanto. A tool that touched memory in the last 5 minutes shows as live.
Sessions — one row per Memanto session, with the logos of every tool that took part, plus writes and reads. Opening a row shows the session’s full event timeline, so you can see one tool write a memory and another read it back later in the same session.

Two localhost-only endpoints back that view:

Endpoint	Returns
`GET /api/ui/sessions?days=7`	Sessions with their participating tools, plus per-tool liveness
`GET /api/ui/sessions/{session_id}?days=30`	One session’s summary and full event timeline

Both are restricted to loopback callers, like the rest of the dashboard API.

A session with no identified tool shows as no tool identified rather than being hidden. That usually means the caller was a bare shell, or a tool that has not been connected yet.

Getting Started

Guides

Reference

Tool Attribution

Tool Attribution

How Memanto identifies the caller

Declaring the tool

What gets recorded

Where it shows up

​Tool Attribution

​How Memanto identifies the caller

​Declaring the tool

​What gets recorded

​Where it shows up

Tool Attribution

How Memanto identifies the caller

Declaring the tool

What gets recorded

Where it shows up