Memory Audit

Memory audit — the surgical one-file pass

This is the cap-trip response, not the daily ritual. /memory-kit:close-session runs every session and captures; this runs when the hot cache has actually outgrown itself and something must LEAVE it. Keeping them separate is the point: a daily ritual that also has to do surgery becomes a ritual people skip.

Always pause for approval before writing. The user talks; you write — including here.

Inputs

• .claude/memory/MEMORY.md — read in full.
• knowledge/concepts/*.md — filenames + first 5 lines, for duplicate detection (the directory may not exist yet; the first move creates it).
• context/handoffs/ — to confirm a session narrative already lives there → drop, not move.

Step 1 — classify every section

Scan by ## heading. For each, count lines and mark exactly one action:

Step 2 — the move plan (a table, never prose)

Close the table with: estimated line savings, and the projected line/byte count afterwards against the caps (180 lines / 32 KB / 3000 chars per line).

Step 3 — PAUSE

Print the plan and ask for approval. Wait for an explicit yes or edits. No writes before that.

Step 4 — execute the approved moves, atomically

• move (create): write knowledge/concepts/<slug>.md with frontmatter matching knowledge/index.md's spec, then add its one-line entry to that index in the same pass.
• move (merge): append under a ### From MEMORY.md (YYYY-MM-DD) header — never duplicate a section that already says the same thing.
• in MEMORY.md: replace the moved section with a one-line pointer plus a one-line teaser. A move without a pointer orphans the content — that is the failure this audit exists to prevent.
• drop: delete; keep at most one distilled line.

Step 5 — the header, then the report

Replace the MEMORY.md current-state header (≤3 lines, dated). Report before/after line and byte counts, every file touched, and save declined candidates to context/handoffs/memory-audit-deferred-YYYY-MM-DD.md so the next audit starts from them.

Refuse when

• No cap is tripped AND no settled-pattern candidate exists → say "no audit needed" and stop. A SINGLE tripped cap is reason enough to proceed (one 3000-char line qualifies).
• The user declines the plan → save it next to the handoffs and stop.

Anti-patterns

• Writing anything before the approval.
• Creating a new concept when a keyword grep matches an existing one — merge bias broken.
• Promoting a session CHRONICLE into a knowledge article. Concepts hold settled patterns; narrative belongs to handoffs, and the action for it here is drop.
• Burying the plan in prose. The table is what makes it reviewable in ten seconds.