Belief-Aware Memory: Teaching Your Agent When Not to Write

A self-improving memory loop sounds like a clear win until you watch it rewrite something correct with something outdated. The agent remembered a fact. You verified it. A later consolidation pass ran against a stale context window, decided the memory was imprecise, and replaced it with a weaker version. The original was better. You lost ground. This is the failure mode that belief-aware memory was built to prevent. Not "agents write wrong things" — that's a model quality problem. The specific failure is: the improve loop, running unsupervised, overwrites correct content it should have left alone. A loop that can degrade its own best work is worse than no loop at all. akm 0.8.0 ships captureMode and beliefState as first-class frontmatter fields on memory assets. Together they tell the consolidation pass what each memory is, what the agent believes about it, and whether it is eligible to be rewritten. The Two Capture Modes Every memory asset now carries a captureMode field. It has two values. hot means the memory was written or explicitly confirmed by a human. The improve loop treats hot memories as read-only. No consolidation plan, no merge proposal, no rewrite. If every memory in a chunk is captureMode: hot , the consolidation pass skips the LLM call for that chunk entirely — the chunk is counted as judgedNoAction before a single token is spent. This is the all-hot chunk early-exit. background means the memory was generated by an agent — promoted during a prior consolidation run, written by an inference pass, produced by akm remember without explicit human review. Background memories are eligible for improvement. The consolidation pass can propose merges, rewrites, deletions, or upgrades. When no captureMode is set, the memory is treated as eligible for consolidation. Memories that existed before 0.8.0 are treated this way on first encounter. --- captureMode : hot beliefState : asserted description : Primary LM Studio endpoint moved to Shredder (192.168.0.99:1234) -