MEMORY.md
Agent memory system
Define what the system remembers across turns or runs, why each memory type exists, how identity and provenance are preserved, and how information is corrected, expired, deleted, and evaluated.
Fillable structure
Replace prompts with project evidence.
Remove any field that does not apply. A smaller maintained file is more useful than generic documentation that agents and reviewers cannot trust.
- 01
Memory taxonomy
Separate state with different authority, lifetime, and privacy properties.
Session state: Define transient conversation and workflow state
Durable facts: Define user, project, organizational, and domain knowledge worth persisting
Derived memory: Define summaries, preferences, patterns, and their confidence or source
- 02
Identity and storage
Prevent memory from crossing the wrong user, workspace, tenant, or authority boundary.
Identity keys: Define user, session, project, tenant, and agent identifiers
Storage: List systems of record, indexes, encryption, access policy, and backups
Retrieval: Define queries, ranking, scope, confidence, and empty-result behavior
- 03
Lifecycle and control
Give users and operators meaningful control over remembered information.
Write policy: State what can be written automatically and what requires confirmation
Correction: Describe inspection, edit, contradiction, source update, and invalidation
Retention: Define expiration, deletion, legal hold, export, and downstream cleanup
- 04
Quality and privacy
Evaluate benefits and harms using realistic longitudinal cases.
Quality tests: Measure retrieval precision, stale-memory behavior, correction, and compaction loss
Privacy tests: Test tenant isolation, consent, sensitive inference, deletion, and data minimization
Operational signals: Monitor write volume, retrieval use, conflicts, corrections, and deletion failures
Related field guides
Next template
TOOLS.md · Tool and MCP contracts