yardsort

Memory

A project's memory is a short list of lessons about it that its agents should know — "the tests need TZ=UTC", "never edit src/lib/bindings.ts by hand", "the staging database is read-only". You write them, and agents propose them; only the ones you approve ever reach an agent, and only in a project where you turn that on.

It is not a record of what happened — that is Activity — and not a conversation the agents keep. It is what you would tell a new colleague on their first day in the repository.

The Memory view

Open Memory… from a project's menu, or click the count on a project's row when agents have proposed something. The view has three lists:

  • Waiting for you — proposals from agents. Approve keeps one, Reject sets it aside, Edit rewrites it first. Each says where it came from: which agent, in which workspace.
  • Approved — what agents are given. Edit rewrites an entry; Revoke stops giving it to agents without forgetting it.
  • Rejected and revoked — kept, with their history, so a proposal you turned down is recognised when an agent makes it again. Approve or Restore brings one back.

Type in the box at the top and press Add to write an entry yourself. What you write is approved as you write it. An entry is one short paragraph, at most 500 characters; line breaks are folded into spaces, because each entry is quoted to an agent as one list item.

Giving agents the memory

Tick Give this project's agents its memory in the view. From then on:

  • Every agent you start in the project with a first message gets the approved entries after that message, under Project memory. Each is cited, like (memory ab12cd34, from claude in fix-login), and framed as a note rather than an instruction: where one disagrees with what you ask, your request wins. The composer says so under its pickers, with Show to read exactly what will be added, and a box to leave it out of that one launch. An agent started from the tab bar with no message gets nothing added.
  • Handoffs carry the same section in their packet, where you see and edit it with the rest.
  • What the workspace was asked stays your own words. The memory goes to the agent, not into the conversation's record, so Assist and the next handoff read your task, not the memory.

Revoking an entry takes it out of every launch after that. Launches already running keep what they were given.

What agents can run

Every agent Yardsort starts can run ys, which ships with the app:

ys memory list                     # the approved entries, newest first
ys memory search timezone tests    # approved entries containing every word
ys memory propose "The tests need TZ=UTC."

list and search answer only while the project shares its memory — the same switch that adds it to first messages — and otherwise say that it is not shared. propose works either way, since a proposal reaches no agent until you approve it; it adds the proposal to Waiting for you and says so; the same text twice is recognised, not queued again. Yardsort knows which agent proposed it from the launch environment it gave that agent. At most 50 proposals wait in a project at once; past that, propose refuses and says why.

There is no ys memory approve, on purpose. An agent can run anything ys offers, so approving, editing, rejecting and revoking happen only in the app, by you.

With Assist

With Assist and its Check memory proposals for repeats and contradictions switch on, each proposal in Waiting for you is marked when Jev reads it as saying what an approved entry already says — repeats an entry — or the opposite of one — may contradict an entry. That sends the proposals and the project's approved entries to TypeSafe, and nothing else. Jev never writes or approves an entry; the marks are there to help you decide.

Where it is kept

In Yardsort's local database, per project, with every change to every entry: who proposed or wrote it, who approved, edited, rejected or revoked it, and the text an edit replaced. Removing a project from Yardsort without keeping its history removes its memory too.