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Memory consolidation and retention

Read this if: you need the exact budget, consolidation, and forgetting rules behind agent memory.

Skip this if: you only need the high-level memory boundary; start with Memory.

Go deeper: Context, Compaction, and Pruning, Work board and delegated execution.

This is a mechanics page for how Tyrum keeps durable memory bounded and auditable over time. It covers consolidation, budgets, forgetting, and tombstones rather than the purpose of memory itself.

Consolidation loop​

What this page covers​

  • budget-driven consolidation
  • preferred eviction order
  • explicit forgetting and tombstones
  • the interaction between conversation compaction and durable memory writes

Pre-compaction flush​

When a conversation is close to auto-compaction, Tyrum may trigger a silent turn that reminds the agent to write durable memory before older prompt context is summarized away. The intended outcome is often "record memory, send no user-visible reply."

Budgets and enforcement​

Forgetting is budget-driven, not TTL-driven.

Budgets may be expressed as:

  • maximum bytes or characters of note text
  • maximum item count by kind
  • maximum embedding or vector footprint
  • maximum episodic detail retained before summaries replace raw payloads

Timestamps may be used as tie-breakers, but not as TTL-based deletion triggers.

When over budget, apply the least-destructive steps first:

  1. deduplicate and merge
  2. summarize or compress high-volume episodic material
  3. drop or downsample derived indexes
  4. evict low-utility canonical items while preserving tombstones

Compression is preferred over deletion, and WorkBoard outcomes may be promoted into durable memory when they become reusable facts or procedures.

Forgetting and tombstones​

Tyrum supports explicit forgetting by stable id or by selectors such as kind, key, tag, or provenance.

For auditability, forgetting produces tombstones:

  • tombstones preserve stable ids and minimal metadata
  • tombstones support deletion proof and compliance workflows
  • tombstones remain bounded, but should survive long enough to meet audit policy

Safety and operator control​

  • secrets must never be persisted into memory
  • memory administration remains provider-defined and policy-gated
  • retrieval must not bypass approvals or policy decisions
  • all memory operations should remain observable through events and audit logs