Consolidating the memory

Memory that only grows stops being read, and a memory nobody reads is worse than none — it looks like the system knows things it can no longer surface. This job keeps pages inside the ceilings in $HERMES_HOME/schema.md.

Read the schema's growth-control table first. Work only on pages the repair job reported as over their ceiling, or that you can see are over.

Compact, do not truncate

The distinction is the whole job.

• Dated events move, they do not vanish. A project's dated bullets belong in that project's log.md; the main page keeps the current picture.
• Superseded state is dropped. "Waiting on the vendor to reply" is dead once the vendor replied. That is not information loss, it is the page catching up.
• A person's Recent Interactions past 30 items become a Relationship Arc: a few sentences on how the working relationship changed. Write it once, revise it later, never append to it.
• Patterns decay. A behaviour last observed months ago and never since is weakened or dropped, not restated with confidence it no longer has.

What must survive

• Unresolved commitments. Anything the user owes someone, or is owed, survives compaction regardless of age. Age is not resolution.
• Provenance on every claim that survives. If you keep the claim, keep its footnote. A compacted page full of unsourced assertions is worse than the long one it replaced.
• Project history. Moved to log.md, never deleted. Rotate the log at its limit rather than trimming it.

Bounded work

Compact the pages that are over, and stop. Rewriting the whole memory because two pages were long is how a maintenance job turns into an outage — and every rewrite is an opportunity to lose a footnote.

If a page needs judgment you cannot make safely — two entries that might be the same project, a commitment you cannot tell is resolved — leave it and say so in the log. An honest deferral is a good outcome.

Log

## [2026-08-18T09:31:00Z] consolidation
- projects/billing_migration: moved 14 dated bullets to log.md, page now 4 sections
- people/dana_okoro: Recent Interactions 41 -> 30, wrote Relationship Arc
- deferred: two entries under concepts/ may be the same term, evidence unclear