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agent memory: durable working notes / findings across turns (identity, not one-shot) #550
Description
Parent
#548 (agent session architecture)
Problem
Thinking is ephemeral (not in SessionStore). That is fine — CoT should not
survive refresh.
What is not fine: nothing durable carries findings, decisions, or
identity across turns. The assistant refers to “the previous assistant.”
Each send feels one-shot. Other harnesses feel like the same agent walked
back into the room.
#536 (session TODOs) is adjacent (task list in the prompt). This issue is
semantic memory: “we decided X, the bug is in Y, don’t touch Z.”
Goal
The agent can choose to persist important findings/ideas across turns
(and we may auto-extract a small working-memory block). New/Clear resets it
(new session = new mind). Refresh keeps it (session-owned, like cwd).
Success: mid-session, “what did we conclude last turn?” is answerable from
session state, not from hoping the last 400 assistant paragraphs still
contain it after the 3.5M slice.
Constraints (lock)
- Thinking rows stay ephemeral. Do not dump CoT into Redis/Blob as the
memory mechanism. - Memory is session-owned (rides the session architecture — addressable per-user sessions with session-owned state (cwd, sandbox binding) #408 object / envelope
metaor a
dedicated small field) — not a new cloud product, not local-only. - Bounded. A novel is not memory; it is another 8 MiB problem. Future plan
Caps table (generous NEW cap, Function-safe if it rides a Function body). - Feature-divide: canvas may show a compact “notes” affordance later; v1
can be host-folded into the system/prompt only (no dual chat). - Agent-authored persist is the honesty bar: we do not silently invent a
persona from truncated history.
Non-goals
- Personas (feat: user agent personas (AGENTS.md profiles) + New session inject #329, shipped) — different layer (standing orders)
- Templates / fork (feat: agent templates / forking (save good context, reuse later) #372)
- Replacing the transcript
Suggested next
create-plan against #548 A2. Decide: reserved meta.workingNotes vs a
small Blob sidecar vs a first-class tool (remember / recall).
Peer harness notes
Pi CustomMessageEntry / CustomEntry inject extension state into (or
beside) the LLM context without dumping CoT. Oh My Pi “advisor” notes are a
separate window — we do not want a second agent; we want a small
session-owned notes block (#550) the fold can always include.
Compaction should keep notes (they are the identity), not summarize them
away (#552). Skills catalog (#557) is playbooks, not findings.
Orrery (2026-08-15)
Their durable-spec slot (stable prefix region) is the right home for notes: compact into it at phase boundaries (#552), do not append “earlier: …” onto growing history. Notes stay byte-stable across turns so #558’s block 1/2 split still caches. New/Clear wipes the slot (new mind).
Activity
btipling commentedon Aug 18, 2026
Not the first-turn root cause. Operator report 2026-08-18 (“each send feels like the first turn / not myself”) lands on #548 / #549: we prune the tool graph and flatten history.
Working notes still matter after A1: compaction (#552) should write findings into this slot so identity survives a checkpoint. A notes block on top of today’s
formatPromptWithHistorycrumb is still a new assistant reading someone else’s diary. Do not promote A2 ahead of A1 to “fix amnesia.”btipling commentedon Aug 19, 2026
2026-08-19 source-level peer research
#550 is session-owned notes (New/Clear = new mind). Do not grow it into a cross-session handbook — that is #694, later, default off, and it does not fix first-turn identity.
Where notes live (lock with #558 / #552)
Codex world-state diffs and OpenCode Context Epochs are the right shape for a byte-stable slot:
OMP
learnis the honesty bar for any auto-extract: write now, inject next prefix generation if injecting would bust KV cache. For in-session notes we do want them on the next turn of this session — so they belong in the durable-spec / block-2 region that is allowed to change, not in block 1.Two systems (do not mix)
/api/agentmid-turnPi
CustomMessageEntryis still the closest inject shape (beside the LLM context, not a second agent / OMP advisor window).Personas (#329) stay standing orders. Notes are findings.
fix(session): copy-forward workingNotes on host omit (adversarial #940)
test(agent): pin working-notes fold on stores-absent + /api/agent (ad…
btipling commentedon Sep 4, 2026
Shipped by PR #940 (plan #938) merge
3b449d9ede12c3605cc0da3a20599dc91b63d98f.Session-owned agent-authored working notes ride
meta.workingNotes(32 KiB cap), folded between persona and skills as unverified working memory. Compaction survival (#552) and inference-budget policy (#551) remain separate.