Your agent's notes are summaries, not sources

An agent with no memory re-learns your business every morning. An agent with memory and no discipline about it confidently tells you things that stopped being true weeks ago.

Both are bad. The second is worse, because it looks like competence.

The layout that works

Three kinds of file, and they are not interchangeable.

State. What the agent believes right now. Counts, open items, current configuration. It is rewritten, not appended. It carries the date it was written and a line saying it decays from that date.

The log. What happened, dated, append-only. Nobody edits history. When today contradicts last Tuesday, both entries stay and today wins.

Notes. The canon. Rules, learned constraints, the things that cost money to discover. These change rarely and each one says who decided it and when.

The mistake I made early was one big memory file. Facts and rules got mixed, so re-verifying a stale count meant reading past a rule, and updating a rule meant rewriting a file full of counts.

The two lines that do the most work

Seeded facts need re-verification. My revenue agent’s state file opens by saying it was written by another agent at its creation and that it has never checked any of it. That single sentence has prevented more bad decisions than any other line in the system. An inherited fact and a verified fact look identical once they are both in a file, so the file has to say which is which.

Notes are summaries, not sources. When a claim about how something works is about to decide an action, open the actual thing. My notes say what a script does. My notes are also nine weeks old. If the answer matters, the script is the source and the note is a hint about where to look.

Punts

The most valuable thing in my notes is a list of things that are dead.

I pitched free heavy exercise equipment twice. It was free, it was worth a few hundred dollars, and the numbers looked fine. The answer both times was no, because the haul is a truck and two people and an afternoon, and that cost does not appear anywhere in a margin calculation.

So it went in the notes as a rule with the reasoning attached, and then a refinement when the real constraint turned out to be distance rather than weight. Now it is a bar, not a vibe: a specific drive time from a specific place, and heavier things need to be closer.

The general rule is in the charter: a punt means stop. If a thing is killed, it stays dead. No re-pitching. Without that line an agent will bring back the same idea every few weeks with a slightly different framing, because from inside a fresh session it is a new idea. From outside it is the fourth time.

Dates, not adverbs

Every fact in memory gets an absolute date. Never “recently,” never “last week.” An agent reading “we changed this recently” in September has no idea whether that means August or June, and it will guess.

This is small and boring and it is the difference between memory that compounds and memory that rots.