Project Episodic Log

Goal: Remember what happened across days — decisions, incidents, handoffs — without claiming eternal truth.

When to use

• Loop runs that need continuity (STATE.md alone loses narrative)
• Team handoffs between humans and agents
• Postmortems and “why did we do that?”

Tiers

Tier	Role
Episodic	Primary
Scratch	Feed-in during session
Durable	Only extracted invariants

Scheduling

• Append after every meaningful agent run or human decision
• Daily triage loop may summarize last 24h into one episodic block
• Compact weekly under retrieval budget

Required skills

• memory-write — append episodic with who / what / why / evidence
• memory-recall — time-bounded fetch (e.g. last 7d)
• memory-hygiene — compact and drop noise

State shape

## Episodic (recent)
- 2026-07-18 — [decided] Keep markdown memory as default store (PR #12). Evidence: portability.
- 2026-07-19 — [observed] fleet-audit false negative on empty manifests. Fix: count templates.

How it runs

1. Run completes → write 1–5 episodic bullets (not a diary).
2. Link evidence: PR, commit, issue, log path.
3. On recall: prefer last N days, then keyword hit, under token budget.
4. Weekly: hygiene skill merges duplicates and moves invariants to promote queue.

Verification

• Every [decided] entry needs owner or PR link
• Episodic must not silently rewrite history — append or explicit amend note
• Size: if episodic section > budget, fail audit until compacted

Human handoff

• Ambiguous decisions stay episodic until a human marks durable
• Incident writeups stay episodic; only remediation rules promote

Tool-specific notes

With loop-engineering: after Daily Triage, append episodic “what changed in state.”

Grok /loop 1d: hygiene + episodic compact job.

Failure modes

Failure	Mitigation
Novel-length logs	Bullet template; max lines/run
Missing evidence	Schema require link or path
Conflicting decisions	Keep both + supersedes: field
Token blowups on recall	Retrieval budget pattern

Cost profile

Scenario	Tokens
Append-only write	~1k
7-day recall	~5–15k
Weekly compact	~20–40k

Scaffold

node tools/memory-init/cli.js . --pattern project-episodic-log --tool grok