Memory & knowledge

What memory is for

An exocorp’s memory isn’t just retrieval. It’s the substrate that lets the company learn from its own work — notice patterns, accumulate doctrine, surface contradictions, and retire assumptions when evidence stops fitting.

Without active memory governance, the company drifts: stale beliefs keep shaping decisions, repeated mistakes don’t get caught, useful patterns from old work get lost. With it, the knowledgebase becomes a real operating surface.

What lives in the knowledgebase

The knowledgebase is organized by document type. In the operator portal’s Knowledge view, you’ll see these categories:

• 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

Memory isn’t append-only. The knowledgebase actively maintains itself:

• 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 — Every meaningful piece of work produces an outcome review that updates the knowledgebase. The company knows what it tried, what worked, and what didn’t.

Scopes

Memory is partitioned by scope. Each agent has its own working memory; each team has team-scoped doctrine and local operating memory; the company has top-level doctrine and shared summaries. The Knowledge view surfaces all of these and shows 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.