Pause capture, disconnect, or uninstall

mage is three separable things: a CLI, a set of capture hooks it wires into your coding host, and your notes — plain markdown files in your git repo. Removing the machinery never touches the knowledge. Whatever you do below, your mage/ notes, INDEX.md, and decisions are committed files that stay put.

Pause or stop capture

Capture is just hooks, so turning it off is one command. mage disconnect removes exactly the hooks mage connect added from this repo’s .claude/settings.local.json, leaving any host hooks of your own intact:

# Remove mage's capture hooks from this repo
mage disconnect

# ...from your personal settings instead (if you wired them with `mage connect --user`)
mage disconnect --user

This is fully reversible — run mage connect again to resume capture. So “pause” and “disconnect” are the same move; you reconnect when you want it back.

By default mage disconnect also removes the Gate-2 redaction pre-commit hook. To keep that safety net in place while turning capture off, pass --no-git-hook:

mage disconnect --no-git-hook    # stop capture but keep the redaction pre-commit gate

Uninstall the skills plugin

The mage:* skills are a Claude Code plugin. Remove it from inside Claude Code: open /plugin and uninstall mage, or run /plugin uninstall mage@mage. This only removes the namespaced skills; it does not touch your notes or the CLI.

Uninstall the CLI

The mage command is a global npm package:

npm rm -g mage-memory

What stays behind

• Your notes. Everything under mage/ — notes, INDEX.md, decisions/ — is committed markdown. Uninstalling removes none of it; it is yours, portable, and readable without mage installed at all.
• The capture scratch is throwaway. The git-ignored sinks (.mage/learnings/, .mage/staging/, .mage/metrics/) are disposable by design — delete the .mage/ directory if you want a clean slate.

If you only wanted to quiet mage rather than remove it, prefer mage disconnect over uninstalling — it stops the capture machinery while keeping the CLI and your notes ready to pick back up. See Commands for the full connect/disconnect surface.