Memory
Memory is the durable fact layer TOW uses when answering questions, proposing work, and summarizing company state. It is designed for facts that should remain useful beyond a single chat, meeting note, document, or project Check-In.
Use Memory for concise, reviewable facts:
- Strategic priorities, constraints, and non-goals.
- Customer, product, market, technical, or operating assumptions.
- Decisions and commitments that should influence future recommendations.
- Risks, blockers, learnings, and project status that should be easy to retrieve.
- Facts that should appear as evidence in AI-assisted answers.
Use Docs for long-form context. Use Memory for the important facts that should be carried forward.
Active memory is part of the workspace's trusted operating context. Do not treat a chat answer, generated draft, or pending diff as canonical until the related memory item or snapshot has been reviewed and accepted.
How memory is created
Memory can come from several places in the workspace:
- Company onboarding and snapshot review.
- Project Check-Ins.
- Docs pages that contain durable facts.
- Chat responses or AI actions that propose memory changes.
- Manual edits to existing memory.
Most AI-created memory should pass through review before it becomes trusted context. When TOW identifies facts in source material, it normally creates a memory diff. A person then approves or rejects the proposed change.
Memory lifecycle
Memory is useful only when it stays current. Review it as company facts change.
| Stage | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Capture | A document, chat, project Check-In, or onboarding answer contains a durable fact. | Keep the source clear enough that reviewers can verify the fact. |
| Propose | TOW suggests adding, updating, superseding, or archiving memory. | Review the diff before accepting it. |
| Activate | The fact becomes active memory. | Rely on it in search, chat, planning, and snapshots. |
| Update | The fact changes, becomes more specific, or gains better evidence. | Edit it directly or approve a diff that replaces it. |
| Supersede | A newer fact replaces the older one. | Keep the historical chain when the old fact explains why something changed. |
| Archive | The fact should no longer guide work. | Archive it when it is stale but still useful as history. |
Statuses
Memory statuses describe whether a fact should influence current work.
| Status | Meaning | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
active | Trusted current memory. | Use in answers, planning, search, and snapshots. |
pending_review | A memory item exists but still needs human attention. | Review evidence, confidence, and wording before relying on it. |
superseded | Replaced by a newer memory item. | Keep for history and auditability. |
archived | Removed from current operating context without deleting history. | Use for stale facts that should not guide future work. |
rejected | A proposed or reviewed item was not accepted as useful memory. | Keep as a signal that the fact should not be reused. |
Scopes
Memory is scoped so TOW can answer from the right context.
| Scope | Use when |
|---|---|
| Organization | The fact applies across the whole company or workspace. |
| Project | The fact applies only to a specific product, customer implementation, initiative, or team workspace. |
| Group | The fact is relevant to a defined group of users or team members. |
| User | The fact is personal to one user and should not be treated as company-wide context. |
Check the project picker before creating, searching, or reviewing memory. If you save project-specific facts at the organization level, TOW may apply them too broadly. If you save company-wide facts inside a project, people using All Projects may not see the context they expect.
Confidence
Confidence is TOW's estimate of how well supported a memory item is. It is shown as a value from 0.00 to 1.00.
Use confidence as a review signal:
- Higher confidence means the fact is strongly supported by the source material.
- Lower confidence means the fact may be inferred, incomplete, stale, or ambiguous.
- Low-confidence memory should be reviewed before it affects strategic, customer, legal, financial, or technical decisions.
- Confidence is not a guarantee. A confident fact can still be wrong if the source was wrong or out of date.
Importance
Importance tells TOW how heavily to prioritize a memory item during retrieval and snapshot generation. It is shown on a scale from 1 to 5.
Use importance consistently:
| Importance | Use for |
|---|---|
5 | Company-critical facts, active priorities, major constraints, and high-impact risks. |
4 | Important facts that should often influence planning or answers. |
3 | Useful operating context that matters in the right situation. |
2 | Supporting detail with limited impact. |
1 | Low-priority context kept mainly for completeness. |
Avoid marking everything as high importance. If too many facts are 5, the most important facts become harder to retrieve.
What makes good memory
Good memory is specific, durable, and easy to verify.
Prefer:
- "The current priority is reducing onboarding time for mid-market teams."
- "The EU launch is blocked until data residency requirements are confirmed."
- "Project Atlas uses the enterprise onboarding workflow, not the self-serve workflow."
Avoid:
- Vague statements such as "customers care about setup."
- Temporary notes such as "Alice will send the deck tomorrow."
- Long copied passages that belong in Docs.
- Opinions that are not labeled as assumptions, risks, or decisions.
Review and maintenance habits
Review memory when:
- A customer commitment changes.
- A strategy, roadmap, or technical direction changes.
- A project is closed, paused, or moved to a different owner.
- A snapshot feels wrong or stale.
- Chat answers cite old assumptions.
When correcting memory, prefer the least destructive action that preserves useful history:
- Edit when the same fact needs clearer wording.
- Supersede when a new fact replaces an old one.
- Archive when the fact should stop influencing current work.
- Reject a proposed change when it is unsupported, duplicated, speculative, or outside the intended scope.
Using memory in answers
When TOW cites memory in a response, open the reference before making a high-impact decision. Memory references usually appear with an M display ID. Search by title, type, status, scope, or reference ID when you need to inspect what TOW currently believes.
Memory is a powerful operating layer, but it works best with human review. Treat it as the shared source of durable company facts, not as an unreviewed transcript of everything that has ever been said.