Multi-agent work in three spoonfuls III: a memory that leaves traces

Status of the demo. The viewer was regenerated on August 29, 2026 from a sanitized public projection (with the non-public bits stripped out 😀): the artifact contains no mail bodies, attachments, addresses, absolute paths, tokens, credentials, or microdata. Preamble: remembering is not enough In the second part I went after a bounded problem: getting penta-agent 's memory to retrieve evidence and to recognize when it had found none. The question in this third part is more practical, and it comes out of the system having been in use for a while: what happens to a memory as it grows and turns blurry, or even contradictory? An index can pile up fragments without any trouble, and there are plenty of tools that already do that well. A more useful memory, in my judgment, has to carry provenance, currency, permissions, contradictions, and deletion criteria. It also has to tell finding a source apart from using it correctly. Recent literature insists on separating RAG — retrieval-augmented generation — context management, and agent memory, because they do different jobs and call for different evaluations 1 . What follows has three movements: what changed since part II; which experiments survived a more serious evaluation; and how to show a memory without passing it off as a mind. Spoonful 1: from retrieving fragments to governing evidence In part II the problem was retrieving well : finding the relevant context and recognizing when there was not enough evidence. A useful memory does not only retrieve information; it also has to know where it came from, whether it still holds, where it can be used, and what is allowed to be done with it . RAG mostly solves retrieval. The memory layer adds rules for keeping, updating, relating, or discarding evidence. None of those functions amounts, on its own, to identity. To describe provenance I use concepts compatible with PROV-O — entities, activities, and agents — while currency, sensitivity, and permissions need rules of their own 2 .