Memory

A staff member's memory is markdown in its own repository. There is no database, deliberately: an agent writes markdown well and writes to a schema badly.

The two files

memory/INDEX.md      one line per fact. Read in full at every boot.
memory/notes/*.md    the argument behind a fact. Read only when that fact is in play.

That split is the whole design. Boot context here went from about 52,000 words to about 6,000 by making it, and the saving repeats on every run forever.

The grammar

- **`<slug>`** · [<will|measured|derived>] <the fact, one line>. **So:** <what it changes>. · [note](notes/<slug>.md)

roster lint enforces it, and the portal parses it. Provenance and the note link are optional. The slug, the fact and the So: are not.

Provenance is one of three things: a human ruled it, it was measured, or it was derived. A [measured] fact without an n fails lint, because a number without a sample size is a rumour.

The five rules

1. One line per fact. If it needs more, the extra goes in notes/<slug>.md and the line stays one line.
2. Correct in place. Never append "updated:". An update chain is how one fact becomes six paragraphs that contradict each other.
3. Every fact says what it changes. If you cannot write the So:, it is not memory. Do not add it.
4. Measurements carry n and a date. Constraints do not expire; measurements do. Anything with a review: date is re-read or deleted on that date.
5. Deleting is the maintenance. Cut every line that no longer changes a decision, and log the cut. A memory that only grows is a memory nobody reads.

Rule 5 is the one that gets skipped and the one that matters. Everything else degrades slowly; this one degrades the boot cost of every future run.

What does not go in memory

• Why something was decided. That is log/decisions.md, and it is not boot context.
• How a thing works. That is a draft or a strategy document.
• What is outstanding. That is the pinned status issue.

Nothing is copied between them. Four places, four jobs, and a fact that appears in two of them will disagree with itself within a month.

Checking it

Health, per staff member, has a Memory problems section. Each finding has a button that opens an issue in that staff member's own repository asking them to fix it, which is usually the right move: they wrote it, and an issue on their tracker is a thing that wakes them.

It catches: a missing So:, a duplicate slug, a note nothing links to, a link to a note that does not exist, an over-long line, a [measured] fact with no n, and an "updated:" chain.

The same checks, for a terminal or for CI:

roster lint          # everyone
roster lint cto      # one staff member