0005 — Consolidation Ownership

Status: Accepted

Context

Memory consolidation may require model calls, custom business rules, budget limits, and domain-specific judgment.

If Infinicon hard-codes one summarization model or one consolidation algorithm, it becomes model-coupled and expensive to operate in environments with different latency, privacy, cost, or compliance requirements.

At the same time, consolidation is a core memory lifecycle concept. The runtime cannot ignore it.

Decision

Infinicon will own the consolidation lifecycle and plugin contract, but not a single required consolidation implementation.

The reference server may ship an optional default consolidator. Production users may replace it with their own plugin or external workflow.

The runtime owns:

• Scheduling consolidation.
• Selecting source memory.
• Passing inputs to the consolidator contract.
• Storing consolidation outputs.
• Preserving provenance.
• Marking stale, failed, superseded, or tombstoned consolidation state.

The consolidator plugin owns:

• Model provider selection.
• Prompting or non-LLM synthesis logic.
• Cost and latency trade-offs inside the plugin.
• Domain-specific merge behavior.

Consequences

Infinicon remains model-agnostic while still treating consolidation as a first-class memory lifecycle event.

Users can choose cheap, local, deterministic, or high-quality model-backed consolidators depending on their environment.

The plugin boundary must be carefully specified so bad consolidators cannot corrupt provenance or silently erase source memory.

Alternatives Considered

Built-in LLM consolidation only

This is easier to demo but creates vendor, latency, and cost coupling.

External consolidation only

This keeps the runtime small but weakens the memory lifecycle story and makes default deployments incomplete.

No consolidation in v0

This would make Infinicon little more than persistent retrieval. It would fail the long-term memory goal.

Follow-Up Work

• Draft the consolidator plugin interface.
• Define consolidation failure and retry semantics.
• Define how tombstones invalidate derived consolidations.