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03 · Memory & State

Provenance Clarity

Every fact in the system is traceable to its author, source, and reasoning. The cure for Ghost Knowledge.

Provenance Clarity means you can point to any piece of knowledge in the system and answer three questions: Who put this here? When? Why? This is the antidote to Ghost Knowledge. When an agent stores a fact, Provenance Clarity requires that the fact be tagged with its source (which agent or human), its timestamp, and the reasoning or evidence behind it. This transforms the memory system from a pile of assertions into a traceable knowledge graph where every node has a history.

Example
A team queries their memory system: "Why do we use Redis for session storage?" The system returns: "Set by Agent:claude-code on March 14, during task #47 (session management setup). Reasoning: 'Redis chosen over database-backed sessions for sub-millisecond latency on auth checks. Evaluated PostgreSQL sessions (8ms avg) vs Redis (0.3ms avg). Decision approved by @sarah in PR #203.'" Every detail is traceable. No ghosts.

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