Definition
Memory lifecycle is the management of knowledge across its lifespan — from raw observation through consolidation to potential decay. Introduced by the LLM Wiki v2 extension, it addresses the problem that not all wiki content is equally valuable forever. Knowledge has a lifecycle, and the wiki should reflect that.
Key Points
- The original LLM Wiki treats all content as equally valid forever; v2 adds temporal awareness
- Four consolidation tiers: Working memory (recent observations) → Episodic memory (session summaries) → Semantic memory (cross-session facts) → Procedural memory (workflows and patterns)
- Each tier is more compressed, more confident, and longer-lived than the one below it
- The LLM promotes information up the tiers as evidence accumulates
- Ebbinghaus forgetting curve: retention decays exponentially with time; each reinforcement (access, confirmation from new source) resets the curve
Related Concepts
- llm-wiki — The original pattern that v2 extends with lifecycle management
- ingest — The operation that feeds information into the lifecycle
- lint — Detects stale claims and orphan content for lifecycle management
- agent-memory-systems — Broader field of persistent memory that includes lifecycle concepts
Implications
The memory lifecycle turns the wiki from a flat collection of equally-weighted claims into a living model where the LLM can express certainty. It prevents the wiki from becoming a “junk drawer” of equally old and equally stagnant content. For this vault, implementing lifecycle would mean adding confidence scores to claims and a mechanism for supersession when sources contradict.
Open Questions
- Is numeric confidence scoring (0.85) false precision, as critics argue? The real signal may be the chain of links a claim carries, not a float.
- Should forgetting be automatic or human-determined? Critics argue that old doesn’t mean stale — a bug from six months ago is often more valuable than one from last week.
- How does the vault distinguish “never accessed” from “not useful”? Access patterns may not correlate with value.