What is elim-mcp?

elim-mcp is a small tool that helps AI coding assistants like Claude Code or Cursor remember what they have already tried and ruled out while debugging a problem. Most memory tools for AI agents focus on saving facts and decisions that turned out to be true, but this one is built specifically to save the dead ends, the theories that were checked and found wrong, so the same wasted investigation does not happen again in a later session. It works through the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, which lets AI coding tools connect to small helper servers. Once installed, it gives the AI agent four simple actions: remember, to record something that was ruled out, solved, decided, or just noted, recall, to search past records before starting a new investigation, get_current, to see recent records for a chat, branch, or project, and trace, to walk through a chain of related findings from start to finish, like following a whole investigation. Records can be linked together with a field called follows_from so a series of ruled-out theories that eventually led to a solution can be replayed as one story. The tool saves everything locally in a SQLite database file placed inside a project's .elim folder, and it automatically detects which git branch you are on so records can be organized without you needing to set that up by hand. Installation only requires adding a short configuration snippet to your editor's MCP settings, pointing it at the package through npx, with no API key or account needed. Because it depends on a native SQLite library called better-sqlite3, most users will get a prebuilt version automatically, but on some less common systems or architectures it may need to compile from source, which requires build tools like Python and a C++ compiler to be installed first.