Agent Memory

Agent memory

This is not a rite like start, workstatus, or wrap. It has no steps of its own and nothing runs at the end of it. It is the set of conventions the other three assume: what a note looks like, where it lives, and how a session knows it can trust one.

The memory lives under one configured directory — memory_dir in .floppy/config, a repository default such as .agent-memory. Everything below calls that directory "the memory directory" rather than naming it, because the name is the consumer's choice, not this plugin's.

One fact per file

A memory note holds exactly one fact. A refinement of an existing fact edits the file that already states it — it does not add a second file next to it. Before writing a new note, check whether one already covers the ground.

Note frontmatter

Every note opens with:

---
name: <slug, matches the filename without .md>
description: <one line, what the note is about>
metadata:
  type: user | feedback | project | reference
  evidence: measured | read | decided | sourced
  as_of: <YYYY-MM-DD, the date the evidence is from>   # optional
---

name is the slug [[wikilink]]-style references resolve by, not the file path — so moving a note between directories does not break links to it, as long as the slug stays put and stays unique across the whole memory.

metadata.evidence: four values, chosen on purpose

evidence records where a claim came from, not how important it is:

If unsure, write read, and say in the note's body what a measurement would need to confirm it. The expensive mistake runs the other way: marking measured something that was in fact only read turns a guess into a fact for whichever session reads it next, and nothing downstream can tell the difference once it's written down.

metadata.as_of: when the claim was last true

evidence says what kind of claim a note holds. as_of says when — the date of the run, the incident, the decision or the source check the note rests on. The two answer different questions and a note wants both: read is defined above as "true until something runs and says otherwise", and decided as the case where a date and an author are what apply instead of evidence.

Date the note by its evidence, not by the clock in front of you. If the measurement is a CI run, use that run's UTC date. A session ending at 22:00 in UTC+3 that stamps its local date writes tomorrow, and the check that reads it runs on UTC — the failure heals itself overnight, which is the signature everyone misreads as flakiness. lint allows one day of slack for exactly this and refuses anything further ahead.

Not git log. That records when the file was last touched — a reformat, a renamed link, a fixed typo — and it moves in the direction that makes an old claim look freshly checked.

The field is optional and stays optional. lint counts undated notes in one line rather than naming them: the field arrives into corpora that already exist, and a check that reddens a memory the day its owner updates the plugin is a check they switch off — taking the four checks that were already earning their place with it.

So no migration is owed. Adding the field as you next touch each note is the expected path. A one-time pass over an existing corpus is fine too, on one condition: every date has to come out of the note's own evidence — the run, the incident, the decision it records. A corpus stamped with the date of the pass itself is worse than an undated one, because it now claims eight notes were checked on a day when nothing was checked at all.

Past note_stale_days (180 by default, a key in .floppy/config) lint names the note and stops. It does not fail the run, because old and wrong are different things. A note recording a frozen decision is fine at three years; a note about a dependency's behaviour is suspect at three months, and no threshold distinguishes them. Three legitimate answers to an aged note:

• re-checked, still true → move as_of to today's date, change nothing else;
• still true but the surroundings moved → update the note and the date;
• no longer true → rewrite it in place. Do not leave the old claim standing next to its replacement; a superseded note that survives is worse than no note.

Deleting is the fourth answer and it is under-used. A note whose subject no longer exists should go, and the commit that removes it should say what replaced it. This is the pruning half of the quota.lock ratchet below: a ceiling with no habit of deletion only decides which session gets stopped by it, and that is routinely not the one that filled it.

The index is a tree, three levels deep

<memory_dir>/MEMORY.md                    root router
<memory_dir>/<half>/INDEX.md              half index
<memory_dir>/<half>/<group>/INDEX.md      sub-index

The root file (MEMORY.md) is a router, not a table of contents: it holds only the notes worth reading in every task, plus one link per half. It stays small on purpose. The session loader that pulls it into every fresh session truncates it past a size limit and does not say so — a note past the cut is not read, and every other check can pass while that happens. Keeping MEMORY.md thin is the only defense; there is no error to catch the loss after the fact.

A half opens its own INDEX.md as a second step, only when the task belongs to that half. A half that outgrows its pointer budget splits into sub-indexes rather than growing a longer index — that split is the third level, and it is the last one. Depth stops at three levels not because of a technical ceiling, but because three is the number of files a session opens before it reaches a note (router → half → note, or router → half → sub-index → note), and a fourth hop has never been measured to still get read. A note nested deeper than a sub-index can reach is unreachable in practice, whatever the file tree says.

When a note gets written: at the moment, not at the end

A note is written when the fact appears, not collected at the end of the session. Five moments produce notes:

• an option or a hypothesis is rejected — the reason is exact now and reconstructed later;
• a measurement lands — the number, and what it was measured against;
• a number turns out to mean something other than it looked like;
• a tool or platform trap bites;
• a decision is frozen — a choice that constrains later work.

Not moments: finishing a task, making a commit, a green suite. Those are in the git log, and a list of what got done is the least valuable thing a memory can hold.

Two reasons, different in kind.

The reasoning is only intact now. A rejected option carries its argument for as long as the conversation holds it. What survives a summary is the decision, not the argument — so the next session proposes the same option again and pays for the same refusal twice.

The end of a session is the most expensive place to think. Every turn resends the whole window, the window only grows, and closing is where it is largest, so the same judgement costs more there than anywhere else. That is arithmetic over the turn measurement in wrap, not a measurement of its own: what nobody has counted is how many of a wrap's turns go to selecting facts rather than to checking and committing.

What is safe to write mid-session, and what is not. A note file collides with nothing — its name is unique, so two sessions writing two notes write two files. Its pointer is a single anchored line, and an insert applies against whatever the index holds at that moment, so two sessions inserting different pointers both land. Neither needs the lock.

The whole-file rewrite is the opposite, and it stays in wrap under the lock: rewriting an index, or either status file, is where a second writer silently drops the first one's work.

The pointer is written with the note, never after it. A note no index points at is a hard lint error, not a warning — nobody will find it. Write both or neither.

The quota.lock ratchet

The memory directory can hold a quota.lock — plain key=value numbers (chars_max for the whole corpus, note_chars_max for one note, pointers_max for one index, pointer_line_max for one pointer line) that bound how large the memory is allowed to get before something has to give.

A fifth is optional and per-half: half_chars_max.<half>=N bounds one half of the tree on its own (half_chars_max.root covers the notes sitting directly in the memory directory). A half with no key is not bounded, so setting none keeps the old behaviour exactly. Reach for these when the corpus cap keeps tripping on sessions that did not fill it: on a repository worked from two machines, the half that grew and the session that hits the ceiling routinely belong to different people, and one number for the whole corpus cannot say which is which. When the corpus cap does trip, the linter now prints the per-half breakdown beside it, whether or not any per-half key is set.

Every ceiling warns at 96% before it refuses at 100%. The run still passes; lint prints a ! line naming the ceiling and, for the corpus one, the breakdown by half. This is what you act on: at a warning the fix is still small and still yours — drop what went stale, split the note you are writing, plan the sub-index. Wait for the refusal and it lands on whichever session crosses the line, which on a memory written from two machines is routinely not the one that filled it, and that session may not raise the ceiling (the ratchet below) nor prune a neighbour's notes (the wrap rite). pointer_line_max has no band: it bounds one line, and a line near the limit is a line that fits.

All of them are facts about this corpus, which is why they live with the memory. The one size limit that is not — the ceiling on the index the harness loads into every session, which it truncates in silence — is a fact about the harness and lives in .floppy/config as index_chars_max, with a default shipped by the plugin. Asking a project to measure that one would be asking it to measure somebody else's tool.

This file is not shipped by the plugin and not copied from one project to another. Its numbers come from measuring the consumer's own corpus — a ceiling copied from a different project is that project's ceiling, which is the same as having none at all: it bounds nothing about the memory actually in front of you.

Raising a number is allowed, but only in the same commit as the notes that needed the extra room, with the reason written into the commit message. A ratchet edited on its own, "to make the check pass," defeats the reason the file exists.

Scope: where the fact is true, not whether it is secret

A fact belongs to one of three places, and the test is where it is true:

• the repository's own memory (memory_dir) — true about this project, travels with git clone, read by anyone with the repo;
• a workplace-wide private store — true across the machines of one workplace but not committed to this repository: another project's memory, or a fact private to this project that still needs to reach a second machine (someone's checkout path, a branch, an access note);
• machine-bound — true on one machine only (a local port, a disk name, a path that differs elsewhere) and never committed anywhere.

Confusing "private" with "machine-bound" is the mistake this scope exists to prevent: a fact can be private to a workplace and still need to sync between that workplace's machines, which a plain .gitignore'd local directory cannot do.

A second question, independent of that one: is the fact about THIS project at all? An evaluation of an outside tool, a shell trap, what this machine has installed — those are true in every project, and filing them under one project buries them for the others. They belong in the cross-project scope, <memory_dir>/common/, which holds one link per audience: common/shared for what the team may read and common/private for what stays off their repository. Both are wired by store and workplace respectively, so a machine that ran only one of them has only that half.

Two rules follow from where those links point, and both are checked:

• Nothing in the committed index links into common/ — nor into the private scope. Both are wired per machine, so a pointer into either is dead for anyone who has not wired it. A session reaches the scope because start names it, not because a pointer led there; lint fails on such a link.
• A note in common/ obeys the same frontmatter rules as any other. It is read by sessions on projects that know nothing about where it came from, so metadata.evidence matters more there, not less.

The quota does not reach it, and that is deliberate: quota.lock holds measurements of ONE project's corpus, and common/ is written by several.

The memory may not live in this repository at all

Where memory_dir points is a layout decision, not something to assume. Some repositories cannot hold agent notes — a checkout the team does not own, or a policy separating notes from code — so memory_dir is a symlink into a separate git repository and is gitignored here. The first scope above is then hosted elsewhere; it is still this project's memory, not the workplace store.

Wiring that up is bash .floppy/run store, once per machine and per worktree; init --memory-repo … --memory-key … does it at setup time. The state to know about is the half-done one — the ignore line added, the symlink never created — because it is comfortable: notes are written and read normally while nothing will ever commit them. guard fails on that combination by name.

Nothing about writing a note changes: same paths, same index, same frontmatter. Two things about closing a session do, and the shim handles both — check prints a memory store section, because this repository's own diff cannot see the notes, and commit commits and pushes that store from the same file list. What you must not do is conclude from a clean git status here that the session left nothing behind: in this layout that is exactly what a clean status looks like while every note is still uncommitted.

Three status genres — and why they stay three files

A repository following this convention keeps three documents about its current state, deliberately not merged into one:

• a project current-state file (statuses_now) that a session start reads whole — rewritten in place, so it always answers "what's true right now" without a reader needing to reconstruct it from history. What is true about the project: frozen decisions, what is red, what waits on the human, metrics with their regression marks;
• a personal current-state file (statuses_personal) — the same shape, one scope narrower: the working state of one person on one machine, what they were mid-way through and where to resume. It defaults into the private scope under machines/<name>/, so no other machine writes that path;
• an append-only dated journal — grows one section at a time, holds the why and the numbers behind a change, and is opened only for the section a session was pointed at.

The first two split for a reason the memory learned earlier. A current-state file is the one artefact rewritten whole on every wrap, so two sessions overlapping in it conflict, while a note collides with nothing by construction and an index merges. Most of what forced those rewrites was personal — a thread of work that changes every session and is shared with nobody. Separated, it never needs merging; what stays in the shared file changes rarely enough that two sessions rarely meet in it. The split is structural, not a matter of tidiness: a private working note written back into the shared file re-creates the collision, on the document a stranger reads first.

The journal stays separate from both because it wants the opposite thing from a writer: a current-state file wants to be overwritten so a stale claim cannot survive in it, while the journal wants every entry preserved so a past number or a rejected hypothesis is never lost to a later edit. A single file trying to satisfy both ends up serving neither — the cost of starting a session would then depend on how much got written into yesterday's entry, and a big day would tax every session after it.

None of the three covers two people wrapping at the same moment on two machines. The wrap lock serialises one machine, and across machines git hands back a merge conflict rather than arbitrating silently. Splitting the personal half out shrinks how often that happens — it does not close it.

Language

Everything this plugin ships — scripts, shim output, these skills — is English, because it is meant to travel between projects unmodified. The memory notes it manages are not: their language is the consumer's own choice, set once as memory_language in .floppy/config. Neither of those settings decides the language a session answers its human in — that follows the human, in every session, and is not configured anywhere. State this plainly so a future session does not "fix" it by wiring a language setting to the reply language; there is nothing to wire.