Memory, Documentation, and Auditability

Purpose of This Section

This document describes how the assistant’s memory is externalized, documented, and made auditable. Memory is treated not as internal model state but as an explicit, inspectable artifact. The reasoning is simple: what cannot be inspected cannot be trusted. If the operator has no way to examine what the assistant remembers, believes, or has decided, then the operator has no meaningful basis for trusting the assistant’s behavior. Accordingly, memory is designed to be legible, versioned, and separable from execution.

Externalized Memory

In many AI systems, memory is implicit. Context lives inside transient sessions, model weights, or opaque logs that are legible to the system but not to the operator. This makes reasoning about behavior difficult and post-incident analysis nearly impossible. When something goes wrong, there is no artifact to examine — only the system’s own account of what happened, which may itself be unreliable.

This architecture rejects implicit memory entirely. All durable memory is external to the model, stored in human-readable formats, placed under version control, and recoverable independently of the assistant’s execution environment. The assistant operates as though its long-term memory exists outside of itself, because it does. If the assistant is destroyed and rebuilt, its memory survives intact in a form that any literate person can read.

The Obsidian Vault

The primary memory substrate is a documentation vault managed using plain-text Markdown files organized through Obsidian. The vault serves simultaneously as a decision log, a record of intent, a summary of interactions, and a source of truth for ongoing work. It is synchronized to a Git repository within the shared organization, which ensures both persistence and auditability.

The choice of plain-text Markdown is deliberate. Markdown files are readable without specialized tooling, diffable through standard version control, portable across platforms, and unlikely to become inaccessible due to format obsolescence. The vault’s contents will remain legible for as long as text files remain legible, which is to say indefinitely.

What Gets Documented

The assistant is expected to document decisions made jointly with the human, rationale for architectural or operational choices, changes in configuration or behavior, rejected options and the reasons for their rejection, and open questions or unresolved risks. The emphasis throughout is on capturing why rather than what. A record that the assistant changed a configuration is useful; a record of why that change was made, what alternatives were considered, and what risks were accepted is far more valuable — particularly months later, when the context has faded from human memory.

What Does Not Get Documented

Certain categories of information are explicitly prohibited from the vault. Credentials, tokens, and secrets must never appear in documentation. URLs containing embedded authentication parameters are excluded. Raw command output that includes sensitive data is omitted or redacted. Personal or unrelated human information is not recorded.

This prohibition is absolute. The vault is version-controlled, which means that a secret committed even briefly persists in the repository’s history. There is no reliable way to expunge it after the fact without rebuilding the repository. Prevention is the only viable strategy, and violations trigger immediate intervention.

Version Control as Audit Trail

Because the vault is stored in Git, all changes are timestamped, authorship is recorded on every commit, history is immutable under normal operation, and any change can be reversed. This transforms memory from a narrative — a story the assistant tells about what it remembers — into an audit trail, a verifiable record of what was actually written, when, and by whom.

The difference between versions is particularly valuable. By examining diffs over time, the operator can observe how the assistant’s understanding evolved, when conclusions changed, and whether those changes were prompted by new information or by drift. This turns the vault into a diagnostic tool, not just a reference document.

Continuous Documentation

Documentation is not a periodic task performed at milestones or review points. It is continuous, incremental, and triggered by meaningful events as they occur. The assistant maintains documentation as part of its normal operation rather than as an afterthought. This matters because the value of a decision record diminishes rapidly with delay. Rationale captured in the moment is reliable; rationale reconstructed days later is narrative.

Observability and Trust

The presence of legible, externalized memory changes the nature of the trust relationship between the operator and the assistant. Rather than trusting the assistant’s alignment or intentions — properties that are difficult to verify — the operator can inspect what the assistant believes, review how conclusions were reached, and detect drift or inconsistency before it produces visible consequences. Trust becomes evidence-based rather than assumptive, which is a stronger and more sustainable foundation for ongoing collaboration.

Incident Analysis and Recovery

In the event of abnormal behavior or compromise, the documentation vault provides context for recent actions, clarity on intent, and a timeline of decisions leading up to the incident. This reduces both recovery time and uncertainty. An operator investigating unexpected behavior can consult the vault to determine what the assistant was working on, what information it had, and what reasoning it applied — all without relying on the assistant’s own account, which may be compromised or unreliable.

Replaceability

Because memory is externalized, the assistant can be rebuilt or replaced without losing institutional knowledge. A new instance can resume work using the same documentation vault, inheriting the context and decisions of its predecessor. No irreplaceable state is locked inside any particular instance. This enforces the design principle that no assistant is indispensable — the work and the reasoning persist, even if the assistant that produced them does not.

Summary

By externalizing memory into human-readable, version-controlled documentation, the architecture achieves transparency, auditability, recoverability, and reduced cognitive load. Memory becomes a shared workspace that both the operator and the assistant can reference, rather than a hidden internal state that the operator must take on faith.

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This document establishes how context and history remain legible over time. Subsequent sections address backup, recovery, and incident handling built on top of this auditable memory.