Memory & knowledge

What memory is for

When a company selects a governed memory package, it can do more than retrieval: notice patterns, accumulate doctrine, surface contradictions, and retire assumptions when evidence stops fitting.

A package may provide active memory governance so stale beliefs do not keep shaping decisions and useful patterns are retained. Another company may use files, an external knowledge system, or a different selected component instead of this knowledgebase model.

What lives in the knowledgebase

A package that provides a knowledgebase can organize it by document type and expose those records through its own API or UI. Common categories include:

• Doctrine — The company’s standing positions — how it operates, what it has chosen, the durable answers that shape behavior across teams.
• Instructions — Specific guidance attached to roles, teams, or workflows. How to handle a class of situation; what to do when.
• Guides — Reusable knowledge attached to particular kinds of work. Often referenced by runs as input.
• Skills — Packaged ways of acting — reusable craft for recurring kinds of work. See labs for how skills are evaluated before they reach production.
• Reviews — Outcome interpretations attached to past work. Captures what was learned, what surprised, what should change.
• Summaries — Compiled rollups of memory. Things the company decided are worth keeping in compressed form for ongoing reference.
• Root — Team and exocorp-level entrypoints — the durable top-level context each team or the whole exocorp operates from.

How memory evolves

This package’s memory is not append-only. Its knowledgebase maintains itself through explicit package-owned operations:

• Claims get dated and sourced — Beliefs are marked as belief, with the evidence they rest on and when they were made. Nothing in the knowledgebase is timeless by default.
• Contradictions surface — When new evidence conflicts with an existing claim, the contradiction is flagged for review — not silently resolved.
• Stale sources lose authority — Sources whose evidence stops fitting get demoted. Old assumptions that the world has moved past are retired.
• Reviews feed back in — Meaningful activity may produce an outcome review that updates the package’s knowledgebase. The package defines when and how that happens.

Scopes

Scope is package-defined. The reference package may use principal, team, and company scopes, while another package may choose different partitions. A package-owned knowledge surface can expose its scopes and show where each claim lives.

Failure modes

• Stale memory as current truth — The company keeps acting on assumptions that no longer match reality because nothing surfaces the gap.
• Memory hoarding — Useful patterns from one team’s work never reach other teams because nothing promotes them.
• Belief inflation — Things start as bets, become claims, and then quietly become “just how we operate” without ever being revalidated.
• Memory as activity log — The knowledgebase fills up with everything that happened, with no governance about what to keep, demote, or retire. Quantity replaces quality.