Memory Hygiene Loop

July 20, 2026 · View on GitHub

Goal: Prevent memory rot — stale facts, duplicate episodics, unbounded scratch — on a schedule.

When to use

Any project past week one of memory engineering
Audit warns on size, staleness, or missing owners
After incidents involving wrong remembered facts

Tiers

Tier	Hygiene action
Scratch	Delete/archive past TTL
Episodic	Compact, dedupe, promote invariants
Durable	Revalidate evidence; revoke or refresh `as_of`

Scheduling

Recommended:

/loop 1d light pass (scratch TTL only)
/loop 1w full hygiene (compact + durable review)
GitHub Action weekly cron for teams

Week one: report-only (propose deletions, do not apply).

Required skills

memory-hygiene — scan, propose, apply
memory-verifier — approve durable revokes/promotes
memory-write — apply patches

How the loop runs

Scheduler fires.
Measure sizes vs memory-budget.md.
Flag: expired scratch, episodic > N days raw, durable without owner, conflicts.
Propose patch list in MEMORY-STATE.md → Hygiene proposals.
(Phase 2) Auto-apply safe ops: scratch TTL, episodic dedupe.
(Phase 3) Human/verifier for durable changes.
Append summary to memory-run-log.md.

Post-run critique

False positive deletions
Facts that should have been durable
Budget adjustments for next week

Verification

Never delete durable without revoke record
Keep backup branch or git commit before apply
memory-audit score must not drop more than 10 points silently

Human handoff

Durable revokes
Anything tagged security / compliance
Contested decisions

Tool-specific notes

Grok

/loop 1w Run memory-hygiene skill. Report-only first. Update memory-run-log.md.

Claude Code: $memory-hygiene with explicit “do not apply durable changes.”

With loop Daily Triage: add memory size signals to triage output.

Failure modes

Failure	Mitigation
Aggressive deletion	Report-only week; soft archive
Hygiene never run	Audit staleness signal
Fight with humans over facts	Require owner ack
Costly full-file rewrites	Patch-style edits

Cost profile

Scenario	Tokens
Light daily	~10k
Weekly full	~40–80k

Scaffold

node tools/memory-init/cli.js . --pattern memory-hygiene-loop --tool grok