> notes/ — Narrative. What happened each session — decisions, actions, open items. Append-only. Never modified after the day ends
I already have to fight the agent constantly to prevent it adding backwards compatibility, workarounds, wrappers etc. for things that I changed or removed. If there's even one forgotten comment that references the old way, it'll write a whole converter system if I walk out of the room for 5 minutes, just in case we ever need it, and even though my agents file specifically says not to (YAGNI, all backwards compatibility must be cleared by me, no wrappers without my explicit approval, etc.). Having a log of the things we tried last month but which failed and got discarded sounds like a bad idea, unless it's specifically curated to say "list of things that failed: ...", which by definition, an append only log can't do.
I have hit the situation where it discovered removed systems through git history, even. At least that's rare though.
A lot of devs, including me, have tried something similar already. I don't really find this approach reliable.
Firstly, tools like Claude Code already have things like auto memory.
Secondly, I think we all learned by now that agents will not always reliably follow instructions in the AGENTS.md file, especially as the size of the context increases. If we want to guarantee that something happens, we should use hooks.
There are already solutions to track what the agent did and even summarising it without affecting the context window of the agent. Tools like Claude Code log activity in a way which is possible to analyze, so you can use tools to process that.
When I tried something similar in the past, the agent would not really understand what is important to "memorise" in a KNOWLEDGE.md file, and would create a lot of bloat which I would then need to clean up anyway.
There are existing tools to tell the agent what has happened recently: git. By looking at the commit messages and list of changed files, the agent usually gets most of the information it needs. If there are any very important decisions or learnings which are necessary for the agent to understand more, they should be written down >manually< by a developer, as I don't trust the agent to decide that.
Also, there is an ongoing discussion about whether AGENTS.md files are even needed, or whether they should be kept to an absolute minimum. Despite what we all initially thought, those files can actually negatively affect the output, based on recent research.
Text files + Git > Vector DBs. Nice work.
I'm curious about how this scales. As the notes/ directory grows over weeks or months, reading past daily logs will eat up the context window.
Could add a scheduled GitHub action that compacts long history into a vector db and then have the agents also check that vector db in addition to md and git history.
It's curious when agents remember traumatic events and replay them instead of avoiding them.
I was stuck on a task for a couple of days. Deleted the memory about some debugging sessions, thing just unlocked itself again. The harness was basically replaying the trauma over and over again.
I honestly think it's better to not have stateful stuff when working with agents.
> AI agents already read AGENTS.md (or CLAUDE.md, .cursorrules, etc.) as project instructions. This kernel uses that mechanism to teach the agent how to remember.
Dude, this is just prompts. It is as useful as asking claude code to write these files itself.
Yeah, all the claw based agents use similar structure. I experimented a little with SQLite DB with embedding so it could vector search but I did not manage to get it to do better. Best is still to just stuff things in context and let it full text search history.
I already have to fight the agent constantly to prevent it adding backwards compatibility, workarounds, wrappers etc. for things that I changed or removed. If there's even one forgotten comment that references the old way, it'll write a whole converter system if I walk out of the room for 5 minutes, just in case we ever need it, and even though my agents file specifically says not to (YAGNI, all backwards compatibility must be cleared by me, no wrappers without my explicit approval, etc.). Having a log of the things we tried last month but which failed and got discarded sounds like a bad idea, unless it's specifically curated to say "list of things that failed: ...", which by definition, an append only log can't do.
I have hit the situation where it discovered removed systems through git history, even. At least that's rare though.
Firstly, tools like Claude Code already have things like auto memory.
Secondly, I think we all learned by now that agents will not always reliably follow instructions in the AGENTS.md file, especially as the size of the context increases. If we want to guarantee that something happens, we should use hooks.
There are already solutions to track what the agent did and even summarising it without affecting the context window of the agent. Tools like Claude Code log activity in a way which is possible to analyze, so you can use tools to process that.
When I tried something similar in the past, the agent would not really understand what is important to "memorise" in a KNOWLEDGE.md file, and would create a lot of bloat which I would then need to clean up anyway.
There are existing tools to tell the agent what has happened recently: git. By looking at the commit messages and list of changed files, the agent usually gets most of the information it needs. If there are any very important decisions or learnings which are necessary for the agent to understand more, they should be written down >manually< by a developer, as I don't trust the agent to decide that.
Also, there is an ongoing discussion about whether AGENTS.md files are even needed, or whether they should be kept to an absolute minimum. Despite what we all initially thought, those files can actually negatively affect the output, based on recent research.
I was stuck on a task for a couple of days. Deleted the memory about some debugging sessions, thing just unlocked itself again. The harness was basically replaying the trauma over and over again.
I honestly think it's better to not have stateful stuff when working with agents.
Dude, this is just prompts. It is as useful as asking claude code to write these files itself.