0003 — Memory Primitives

Status: Accepted

Context

Infinicon must represent memory across many agent domains without baking in one vertical such as coding, research, or customer support.

A simple fact table is too weak because agent memory changes over time, contradictions happen, and source auditability matters. A pure knowledge graph is also not enough because raw observations and synthesized summaries have different lifecycle semantics.

Decision

Infinicon will define these core memory primitives:

• Episode: immutable raw event.
• Atom: versioned extracted unit of knowledge.
• Consolidation: synthesized memory artifact over source memory.
• Link: typed relationship between memory objects.
• WorkingContext: ephemeral assembled context for one task.

Domain-specific schemas must be implemented as memory profiles or plugins unless they change core memory semantics.

Consequences

The runtime can preserve provenance while still supporting retrieval and compression.

Episodes remain auditable. Atoms allow fine-grained retrieval. Consolidations provide long-term compression. Links represent provenance, contradiction, support, and supersession.

The model is more complex than a vector-only memory store, but that complexity is necessary for production memory semantics.

Alternatives Considered

Facts, entities, and relations only

This works for some knowledge-graph use cases but underrepresents temporal history, raw observations, and consolidation lineage.

Raw episodes only

This maximizes auditability but makes long-term retrieval and compression poor.

Summaries only

This is simple but loses provenance and makes deletion cascade behavior hard to reason about.

Follow-Up Work

• Define profile extension rules.
• Decide whether confidence is core or profile-specific.
• Define lifecycle transitions for disputed, superseded, and tombstoned objects.