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The Agent’s Permanent Memory

Knowledge files are the agent’s permanent memory — long-term facts that persist indefinitely. While episodes capture what happened and consolidation compresses the timeline, knowledge files store what Wolffish knows about you, your world, and your preferences.

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Location

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The Five Default Files

These five files are created during first launch. You can add more knowledge files — everything in the knowledge/ directory is indexed and searchable. Create books.md, health.md, or whatever categories make sense for your life.

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How Knowledge Gets Written

Knowledge enters the system through three paths:

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1. Automatic Curation (LLM-driven)

During the nightly compaction pass, the LLM works as a curator, not an extractor: it reads the day’s episode log alongside the current contents of the five knowledge files and rewrites the files that changed, whole — one tidy ## section per person, project, and topic; near-duplicates merged into a single line; contradictions resolved in favour of the newest evidence; junk deleted on sight. The section structure is enforced by the app itself (those ## headers are exactly what the <memory_map> surfaces), every rewritten file keeps its previous version as <file>.md.bak right beside it, and your hand-written edits survive curation. A day with nothing durable ends in a no-op. Once a month, the deep reflection audits these same files adversarially — hunting stale entries and conclusions the evidence has turned against.

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2. memory_save — The Model’s Write Path

When you say something like “remember that I prefer conventional commits” or “my manager’s name is Sarah,” the agent calls the memory_save tool:
The operating contract instructs Wolffish to save one self-contained sentence whenever it learns something durable — a preference, a decision, a project fact, a person detail — and never to hand-write memory files directly. memory_save is deduplicated the same way promotion is: saving a fact that’s already on file is a no-op. The type defaults to technical when omitted.

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3. Manual Editing

Open any knowledge file in your editor and change it. The brainstem file watcher detects the change and the cortex re-indexes it immediately.

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How Knowledge Gets Read

Knowledge files are not injected into the prompt. Instead, the <memory_map> stub lists the topics of the five curated files — their ## section headers — so the model always knows what durable facts exist to be fetched:
When a topic is relevant, the model retrieves it:
  • memory_get on file:brain/hippocampus/knowledge/preferences.md returns the whole file
  • memory_search with sources: "knowledge" finds individual facts across all knowledge files
This is deliberate: a fact you saved in March costs zero tokens per turn until a conversation actually needs it — and the retrieval doctrine means a definite reference to it will trigger a search unprompted.

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Example: preferences.md After a Few Weeks

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Example: people.md

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Editing Guidelines

Just tell Wolffish during conversation:
  • “Remember that my API key for Stripe is in 1Password”
  • “Note that we decided to use PostgreSQL over MySQL for the new service”
  • “My flight to Riyadh is on June 3rd”
The agent saves each fact with memory_save, routed to the appropriate knowledge file.
Knowledge files work best when they’re concise. Each entry should be a fact, not a story — memory_save enforces this by design, taking one self-contained sentence at a time. Use ## section headers to group facts: the headers are exactly what the <memory_map> surfaces to the model (up to 8 per file).

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Custom Knowledge Files

Create any .md file in the knowledge/ directory and it becomes part of the agent’s searchable memory:
The brainstem file watcher will detect it and the cortex will index it under the knowledge source, so memory_search finds its contents like any other memory. Two things stay reserved for the five default files: the <memory_map> topic lines only enumerate the curated five, and memory_save only writes to them — custom files are yours to maintain by hand.