Milla builds a MemPalace
Actress Milla Jovovich is coding a tool called MemPalace with Ben Sigman to manage memory and files for her creative writing, using Claude as part of the workflow — a neat example of an artist building bespoke writing tech. That’s interesting because it shows creator-led tooling (not just big companies) shaping how people prototype, store and prompt creative work. If you write or teach, these DIY tools hint at new ways to structure long projects and source material. (x.com)
A film star spent months building a memory tool for artificial intelligence, and the unusual part is not the celebrity name. The unusual part is that Milla Jovovich says she built MemPalace after getting tired of losing months of context from chats with Claude and ChatGPT every time a session ended. (mempalace.tech, decrypt.co) She says the tool grew out of writing and project work, not a venture-funded lab. On the MemPalace site, Jovovich says she had piled up thousands of conversations covering creative ideas, business reasoning, and debugging sessions before deciding the existing setup kept throwing away the parts she needed. (mempalace.tech) Ben Sigman is the engineer on the project, and Jovovich is presented as the architect of the system. Their public writeups say they used Claude Code, Anthropic’s coding tool that works in a terminal and can read a codebase, edit files, and run commands across a project. (mempalace.tech, anthropic.com) The basic problem they are trying to solve is simple: chat assistants forget. The LongMemEval benchmark was created to test whether a system can answer questions from long chat histories over time, because ordinary chat windows are bad at carrying forward old decisions and details. (arxiv.org, xiaowu0162.github.io) Most memory tools try to save space by deciding what is important and discarding the rest. MemPalace takes the opposite approach and says it stores conversations verbatim, then uses search and retrieval to find the right passage later instead of trusting a model to summarize your past for you. (mempalace.tech, github.com) That design choice fits the name. A “memory palace” is an old mnemonic method in which a person imagines rooms and hallways and places facts inside them, and MemPalace says it borrows that idea to organize stored material into a structure that can be searched later. (decrypt.co, github.com) The launch spread fast because the project claimed a perfect score on LongMemEval and a free, local setup under the Massachusetts Institute of Technology license. The project site said it passed 500 out of 500 benchmark questions and picked up more than 7,000 GitHub stars in 48 hours. (mempalace.tech, github.com) Then the backlash arrived almost immediately. MemPalace’s own site now says the raw local score was 96.6 percent, the 100 percent result used large language model reranking, and three fixes were tuned on failing questions, which is why some developers argued the launch marketing oversold the benchmark result. (mempalace.tech, cybernews.com) Even with the argument over the score, the part worth watching is who built it. Anthropic markets Claude Code as a tool that lets people describe what they want in plain language while the system edits files and runs workflows, and MemPalace is a clean example of a writer using that shift to build custom software around her own process instead of waiting for a software company to guess it. (anthropic.com, claude.com) That is why this story is bigger than one repository. A Hollywood actor with a specific writing problem worked with one engineer, used an artificial intelligence coding agent, published the result on GitHub, and ended up in a live argument about benchmarks, architecture, and product design with software developers within days. (github.com, decrypt.co, cybernews.com)
