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type Convention
title Core Memory Principles & Agent Contract
description Foundational design principles and minimal behavioral guarantees for agents maintaining persistent project memory.
resource https://github.com/okf-memory/okf-agent-memory
tags
convention
principles
contract
agent-rules
generated
by at
agent/mcp
2026-09-08 07:51:26 UTC
status stable
sources
resource id title last_modified
../../docs/spec/CONVENTION.md
convention
OKF Agent Memory Convention v0.1
2026-08-27

Core Memory Principles & Agent Contract

The Agent Memory Convention enforces ten foundational design principles to ensure project memory remains accurate, compact, and maintainable over time.1

The 10 Minimal Agent Guarantees

  1. Persistent knowledge belongs in the OKF corpus: Conversations reset, but the knowledge/ bundle survives.
  2. Search before write: Search existing concepts before authoring to prevent duplication.
  3. Prefer update over duplication: Expand or revise matching concepts when new facts emerge.
  4. No chain-of-thought storage: Store only durable facts and decisions; discard transient reasoning.
  5. Preserve provenance: Track sources, URIs, and dates using standard OKF mechanisms.
  6. Preserve uncertainty & qualify inference: Distinguish directly observed facts from agent inferences.
  7. Preserve meaningful history: Track changes via log.md and lifecycle metadata rather than silent overwrites.
  8. Review knowledge after substantial work: Execute the review loop described in lifecycle.
  9. Validate changes: Ensure bundle conformance using the tooling layer outlined in architecture/layers.
  10. Never claim persistence unless confirmed: Report failures honestly if a disk write or validation fails.

Domain Neutrality

The convention intentionally avoids prescribing a fixed taxonomy. Projects may define custom semantic types (e.g. Fact, Decision, Client, Book, Runbook, Metric) as needed. This flexibility supports diverse domains as detailed in project/overview.

Related Concepts

Footnotes

  1. OKF Agent Memory Convention v0.1 ↩