Tiers

Tier Reference

short_term

• Purpose: immediate conversational context
• Typical content: transient details, near-term intent, short-lived context
• Lifecycle: expires quickly unless reinforced by access patterns

episodic

• Purpose: session/project-level events and decisions
• Typical content: milestones, incidents, meeting outcomes
• Lifecycle: can be distilled into semantic facts or archived

semantic

• Purpose: stable durable knowledge
• Typical content: long-lived facts, preferences, canonical decisions
• Lifecycle: treated as permanent in current lifecycle defaults

When to Use Each

• Use short_term when information is likely to become stale soon.
• Use episodic for meaningful events that may later distill.
• Use semantic for durable facts you want recalled across long time spans.

Automatic Promotion and Decay

raw input
  |
  v
[short_term] --(access_count >= 2)--> [episodic]
  |                                       |
  |--(24h unaccessed)--> expired          |--(importance/access + age)--> distilled -> [semantic]
                                          |
                                          |--(30d + low access)--> archived

Lifecycle Configuration

Default rules in the server:

• short_term.expireAfterMs = 24h
• short_term.promoteIfAccessCount = 2
• episodic.distillAfterMs = 7d
• episodic.archiveAfterMs = 30d

See Lifecycle API for run controls (dryRun, triggeredBy).