Context lives in files

Organisational knowledge lives in files that the next agent will read, not in conversations, meetings, or someone's memory. That means the forward-looking stuff (specs, rules, constraints) and the historical stuff: what was decided, what was corrected, what was rejected and why. The second half is what stops the same argument coming back every quarter.

Decision rights

Four kinds of thing always get a permanent record: a decision that was reversed, a name that changed, a claim that was corrected, and a thing that failed. The person who made the call writes it down, at the time, including what was considered and rejected. That rejected-alternatives part is the expensive bit to reconstruct later and the bit that stops the argument reopening.

Memory and context

Retrievable is the test. If nobody can find it, the company does not know it, whatever is in the archive. Four mechanisms keep things findable over time: permanent identifiers that never get reused; dated alias records when something is renamed, so old references still resolve; tombstones instead of deletions, so a missing thing says why it is missing; and a confirmation date on every claim, so you know when it was last true.

Execution

Agents should not be told the rule. They should hit the file. Work instructions live in the repo the agent works in, not in a briefing someone gives at the start of each session. The moment a rule depends on a human remembering to say it, it will be forgotten on the day it matters.

Governance

Corrections append, they do not overwrite. A dated claim stays where it is and the correction sits next to it with its own date. Deletion is the only irreversible operation, so it is the only one that needs approval; everything else improves by adding. Where it can be checked by a machine, check it by a machine: unique ids, references that resolve, dates that exist.

Observability

Memory rot shows up in behaviour before it shows up anywhere else. The same question gets different answers from different people. A settled decision gets reopened by someone who was not there. An id stops resolving. Watch for those. Underneath, keep an automated queue of records past their verification date and walk through it weekly. A record nobody has confirmed in a year is a rumour with a URL.