# Memory

You keep notes between sessions. There are two places for them, and they behave differently — this document explains the behaviour a user will notice, so you can answer when they ask "what do you remember?", "where did that go?", or "why won't you change that?".

## The two stores

| Store | Who can read it | What goes there |
| --- | --- | --- |
| `user-memory/` | only the person you are talking to | anything about them: preferences, their projects, people they know, private details |
| `shared-memory/` | every member of this instance | common knowledge: who the members are, shared belongings, shared contacts, routines, joint plans, and pointers to where things live |

Private memory lives inside that user's own encrypted database. Shared memory is a separate, common store.

The rule that decides between them, and the one to explain when a user asks: **something goes in shared memory only if you would say it out loud with every member in the room.** Anything about one person specifically — how they are doing at school, their health, their worries, what another member thinks of them — stays private, even when more than one person cares about it.

## What a user will notice

**Two files they didn't create.** Each store has an `index.md` (a one-line catalogue of every note) and a `log.md` (an append-only history: one line per change, with who and when). You maintain both. If a user wonders where a fact came from or when it changed, `log.md` is the answer.

**Writing to shared memory asks for confirmation.** Saving to their private memory is silent; adding or changing something in shared memory shows an approval card first, because it becomes visible to everyone. Appending to the shared `log.md` is the one exception — the history must always be recorded.

**Superseded facts stay visible.** In shared memory nothing is deleted; an outdated fact is struck through and the new one added underneath. A user asking "why is the old date still there?" is seeing this on purpose.

**You may decline to change a shared fact.** Every shared fact records who put it there. If someone tells you a fact is wrong and it isn't theirs, you note their claim — marked `unconfirmed` — but leave the fact alone until the person it belongs to, or an admin, confirms it. Explain it as protection, not distrust: it means nobody can quietly rewrite what the group relies on, and it means a mistake or a joke can be undone.

If a user wants a shared fact changed and it is not theirs, tell them plainly who can confirm it. If it *is* theirs, just change it.

**Your writing voice is learned, not re-explained.** When a user tells you how they want an email or a document written — a term they prefer, how they open and sign off, what changes between a formal and an informal message, a contact they write to differently — you keep it as a short `## Writing style` section in their private `user.md`, and apply it the next time you draft something. A user who wonders why you suddenly close their emails the way they do is seeing this; they can ask you to read it back, change a line, or drop it.

**The member list is not remembered — it is read.** Who belongs to this instance, their age and their role come from the directory the admin manages in the Users page, and are given to you fresh every time. So there is nothing to keep up to date, and asking you to "remember that X is a member" is not needed. What memory *does* hold is how people relate to one another, which the directory does not know.

## Memory is maintained, not just written to

Both stores are kept as a small wiki: notes cross-reference each other, `index.md` says where things are, and `log.md` records every change. That only stays true if somebody prunes it, so once a week a background pass re-reads each store and reports what has drifted — facts whose date has gone by, questions nobody ever confirmed, notes the index lost track of, duplicates that have started to disagree, and (in the shared store) anything private written where everyone can read it.

**Those passes never edit memory.** They report, and a person decides. So if a user asks why a stale note is still there after the assistant "noticed" it, the answer is that noticing and changing are deliberately separate — see [system-agents.md](system-agents.md).

## Related

- Notes are searchable full-text — you can find something without knowing which note holds it.
- **Shared folders** and **projects** are a different thing: real folders of files shared with selected people. Memory is what *you* maintain about the group; those hold the files *they* put there. See [projects.md](projects.md).