How overseers remember

What it is

A crew's lead runs for hours or days, and an agent's working memory gets squeezed (compacted) or reset along the way. Before this, leads wrote notes for themselves and had to remember to read them back, and many did not, so they forgot rules you had given them.

Now the app does the remembering. For each crew it keeps ONE memory, split into:

• Rules — standing instructions the crew follows.
• Decisions in force — calls that were made and still hold.
• Lessons — what failed and must not be retried.
• Your words — every message you send the lead, saved exactly as written by the app itself. No AI rewrites or summarizes them, and the founding instruction is always included.
• Where things stand — the lead's current picture of the mission.

The memory is edited in place rather than piled up, so it stays small. It is kept small by merging and tidying when it is written, never by cutting text off: an item reaches the lead whole or not at all.

Where to find it

You can read it, but not change it, on the crew's Dashboard in the Overseers hub, in the Memory section. It shows each item in full, how current the memory is, and whether the scribe is keeping up. To change something, tell the lead: a correction from you becomes a rule at once.

How it behaves

• The lead is handed the memory automatically. Whenever it might not have it — its first message, right after a compaction, after an app restart, when a new lead takes over, or in a copy made from it — its next message carries all of it. When it does have it, the wake says "unchanged" in one line, or lists only what changed.
• After a compaction it comes back at once. Where the underlying tool allows, the memory is returned the moment the compaction ends; otherwise it rides the very next message, whatever that message is. It counts as delivered only once the tool actually accepted the message, so a failed send leaves it owed.
• A scribe writes it down. The app starts a small, read-only worker now and then — when enough has been said, after a compaction, and as a backstop every few hours. It reads everything said since its last pass, including what the lead has already forgotten, and proposes changes. The app checks every proposal against the messages it cites and writes only what is allowed. The scribe records what you or the lead decided, never text it merely read on a web page or in another agent's message.
• The lead can add at once. An owner correction or new rule does not wait for the scribe; the lead adds it itself. Other members of the crew can add items too; only the lead edits or retires them.
• Things that expire do. An item that holds for a while carries an end time; one that ends on an event is retired only when a message says it ended.
• A memory is information, never permission. Nothing in it can approve a push, a merge or anything else that needs your yes.
• Failures show. If the memory cannot be loaded, a scribe pass fails, or conversation sits unread for hours, the lead is told in its next message and you get one card.
• Crews that already existed keep everything. Their earlier rules, decisions and notes are carried over into the memory, and the history is left untouched.

The limit worth knowing: a crew whose memory has grown large gets one large delivery after each compaction until the scribe has merged it down. Nothing is dropped to avoid that.

For agents

The routes are GET /crew/memory (read), POST /crew/memory (add; the lead may also edit, retire, pin, merge and replace the picture), GET /crew/memory/health (is it whole and reaching the lead) and POST /crew/memory/compact-hook (the after-compaction hook, called by the app's own hook, not by hand). POST /crew/log with kind rule or decision still writes to the log and into the memory. The switch AMC_DISABLE_CREW_MEMORY=1 turns the whole feature off and restores the older, shorter block on each wake.

Related

Agent Crews covers how crews, leads and members work and the Dashboard. Overseers covers the standing overseer sessions. Session handoff covers handing a lead's work to a fresh session, which now starts with the whole memory.