About

The project

CleverMemory started from a simple frustration: AI systems answer whether or not they know. Everything else in the stack got better every year, but the gap between recalled and made up stayed invisible, and everything serious you might build on top of an AI inherits that gap.

So this project takes the opposite bet. Turn language into typed mathematical structure. Answer only what can be proven from what was stored. Say "I don't know" like it's a feature, because it is. The blog lays out the ideas and the fifty years of research they stand on; the standard preview covers the open format underneath.

The person

I'm Jason Varland. I've spent twenty-plus years building software quality and engineering organizations, which is a career-length education in one lesson: never trust what you can't verify. I studied theoretical computer science and mathematics, then spent two decades applying it: leading quality engineering at consultancies and healthcare companies, directing engineering orgs, and shipping production AI systems, including voice agents handling hundreds of real customer calls a day.

Leading generative AI teams showed me both sides of the technology: what it genuinely does well, and the trust hole in the middle of it. Quality engineering taught me that the fix for "sometimes wrong" is never "usually right." It's verification built into the structure of the thing. In early 2026 I went full-time on building exactly that, in Rust, as the memory layer I kept wishing existed.

CleverMemory is that work: a memory that treats proof as the price of speaking.

What "open" means here

The pack format becomes an open standard: the spec, the reference reader, and every importer, Apache-2.0 at freeze. The base packs, built from friendly-licensed public sources, ship free with full provenance. The parts I keep are the engine internals and the curated completion overlay that closes the gaps public data can't. Open where openness builds the commons, owned where years of hard work live: stated plainly so nobody has to guess.

Reach me

Find me on LinkedIn, or follow the blog feed for releases and writing.