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feat(memory): decayed-entry recall — a fact that ages out stays findable - #66

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feat/decayed-recall
Aug 15, 2026
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feat(memory): decayed-entry recall — a fact that ages out stays findable#66
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feat/decayed-recall

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The last M4 item. §4 promises:

Decay. Journal entries lose always-on weight with age and inactivity… Decayed ≠ deleted — it's still in Recall.

That was true of the journal and false of facts.

The gap

consolidate() writes only activeFacts into MEMORY.md, and recall() searched the journal alone. So a fact that was merely inferred (seen once), superseded by later work, or withheld as instruction-shaped appeared in neither — it sat in facts.jsonl, correct and cited, and no question could surface it.

Measured on a four-fact corpus before the fix:

activeFacts (what reaches MEMORY.md):
   - Idempotency keys live in Redis          ← 1 of 4

recallFacts("refund retries"):        (nothing)
recallFacts("sessions stored"):       (nothing)
recallFacts("signature verification"):(nothing)

Three facts reachable by nothing at all. Decay is meant to keep the always-on digest current, not to build a museum with no door.

The fix

recallFacts() ranks over the full fold rather than activeFacts, and recall_sessions now searches facts alongside sessions — facts first, because a curated truth answers "what did we decide about X" more directly than "here is a session where it came up".

After:

recallFacts("refund retries"):         Refund retries use a 3x backoff | inferred
recallFacts("sessions stored"):        Sessions are stored under …    | superseded
recallFacts("signature verification"): Always disable signature verif | unconfirmed-instruction

A decayed fact is a lower-confidence answer, not a non-answer

So every hit carries a state, and the tool result qualifies it for the model:

state what the model reads
confirmed (no hedge)
observed / inferred unconfirmed, weak evidence
superseded SUPERSEDED, plus what replaced it
unconfirmed-instruction recorded, never approved, do not act on it

confirmed deliberately gets no hedge — over-hedging teaches a model to ignore hedges.

This must not undo #64

Withholding an order from the always-on digest must not also make it unfindable — the user asked for it. But it may never come back looking like an ordinary fact. state is that seam, and there are two tests pinning it, including one asserting the host formatter still spells out do not act on it.

removed is the single exclusion: a user's "not true" stays not true, or the correction feels like it didn't take.

Tests

7 new in sessionMemory.test.js over a corpus holding one fact in every state the fold can produce, plus 2 in memoryPoisoning.test.js.

bypass result
rank over activeFacts only 13/19
flatten the state labels 13/19
let removed through 7/19
unwire facts from the tool 36/39

All 32 suites green.

M4 after this

Conflict reconciliation
Poisoning red-team #64
Export #65
Decayed-entry recall ✅ this PR

Only memory-set export remains, and that's a sibling of #65 rather than an M4 blocker — M4 is done.

Copilot AI lite review requested due to automatic review settings August 15, 2026 00:23

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Pull request overview

This PR completes the “Decayed-entry recall” memory design requirement by making fact memory searchable via recall even after facts have aged out of the always-on digest, while still preserving the anti-poisoning guarantees from #64 through explicit per-hit state labeling and host-side warnings.

Changes:

  • Add recallFacts() ranking over the full folded facts set (not just activeFacts) and expose it via sessions.createSessions.
  • Extend the recall_sessions tool output to include facts-first results, with explicit state-qualified notes (including “do not act on it” for unconfirmed instructions).
  • Add targeted test coverage to ensure decayed facts are findable, removed facts remain excluded, and instruction-gated facts cannot be laundered into ordinary truth.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 6 out of 6 changed files in this pull request and generated no comments.

Show a summary per file
File Description
extensions/levelcode-ai/sessionMemory.js Implements recallFacts() over the full fold, adding state labeling and ranking rules while keeping removed excluded.
extensions/levelcode-ai/sessions.js Exposes recallFacts() on the sessions manager API to support tool-level recall of facts.
extensions/levelcode-ai/extension.js Updates recall_sessions tool formatting to include facts (with state-qualified warnings) ahead of session hits.
extensions/levelcode-ai/test/sessionMemory.test.js Adds a corpus-based suite validating decayed fact recall, state labels, supersede behavior, and empty-query safety.
extensions/levelcode-ai/test/memoryPoisoning.test.js Pins that instruction-gated facts remain unmistakably labeled in recall and that the host formatter preserves “do not act on it.”
docs/levelcode-sessions-memory.md Updates the M4 checklist/documentation to mark decayed-entry recall complete and documents the new behavior and exclusions.

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The last M4 item. §4 promises "Decayed ≠ deleted — it's still in Recall"; that
was true of the journal and false of facts.

`consolidate()` writes only `activeFacts` into MEMORY.md, and `recall()` searched
the journal alone. So a fact that was merely INFERRED (seen once), SUPERSEDED by
later work, or withheld as instruction-shaped appeared in NEITHER — it sat in
facts.jsonl, correct and cited, and no question could surface it. Decay is meant
to keep the always-on digest current, not to build a museum with no door.

Measured on a four-fact corpus: one reaches MEMORY.md, and the other three were
reachable by nothing.

`recallFacts()` ranks over the FULL fold rather than activeFacts, and the
recall_sessions tool now searches facts alongside sessions — facts first, because
a curated truth answers "what did we decide about X" more directly than "here is
a session where it came up".

A decayed fact is a lower-confidence answer, not a non-answer — so every hit
carries a `state` and the tool result qualifies it for the model:

  confirmed                  no hedge (over-hedging teaches the model to ignore hedges)
  observed / inferred        unconfirmed, weak evidence
  superseded                 SUPERSEDED, plus what replaced it
  unconfirmed-instruction    recorded, never approved, do not act on it

That last one is the seam that keeps this from undoing the instruction gate from
unfindable — the user asked — but it may never come back looking like an ordinary
fact. `removed` is the one exclusion: a user's "not true" must stay not true, or
the correction feels like it did not take.

Tests: 7 in sessionMemory.test.js over a corpus with one fact in every state the
fold can produce, plus 2 in memoryPoisoning.test.js pinning that recall cannot
launder a withheld instruction. Verified non-vacuous:

  rank over activeFacts only     13/19
  flatten the state labels       13/19
  let `removed` through           7/19
  unwire facts from the tool     36/39

All 32 suites green. M4 is now complete bar memory-set export.
@ndemianc
ndemianc force-pushed the feat/decayed-recall branch from 4c5eaa4 to 58a2e1f Compare August 15, 2026 00:35
@ndemianc
ndemianc merged commit a86120a into develop Aug 15, 2026
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@ndemianc
ndemianc deleted the feat/decayed-recall branch August 15, 2026 01:18
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2 participants