The question determines the memory contract
Different jobs. Distinct homes.
Select diagram to enlargeAn agent may need the state of its current task, a record of an earlier event, a known procedure or a commitment that becomes due tomorrow. Putting all of them into one similarity-ranked collection gives them the same retrieval mechanism without establishing the same meaning.
Memory roles differ in the operations they support, the identity of their records and the controls that accompany use. Reckoning maintains active standing; Atlas holds the durable estate.
Working state and event history
Working memory in Reckoning carries the active task and its current standing. Corrections can update that view while earlier records remain available through the durable estate.
Episodic memory records what happened. An append-only history can retain events and subsequent corrections without rewriting the earlier record. Its identifiers and timestamps support later review.
A current projection and the historical sequence can therefore coexist: one answers what governs the job now, while the other explains how the job reached that point.
Knowledge, procedures and entity facts
Knowledge retrieval finds relevant material such as documents, references and factual records. Ranking is useful for discovery; important assertions still need the relevant source and its version.
Procedural memory identifies how to perform a task: a skill, recipe or workflow with a known version. Selection needs an explicit operation and its prerequisites, not just a passage that sounds similar.
Entity memory organizes facts about identified entities over time. It can distinguish the time a fact applies from the time the system learned it, so a historical question does not silently receive today’s answer.
Future commitments, lessons and space
Prospective memory holds intentions tied to a time or condition. A scheduler or trigger can bring an intention back to work; the action still needs the authority and policy that apply when it becomes due.
Reflective memory holds lessons from prior work. Promoting a lesson into a reusable procedure requires a governed change, so one incorrect observation cannot silently rewrite the agent’s operating instructions.
Location and topology questions such as adjacency, reachability and containment call for structured spatial operations. Embeddings can aid discovery; exact paths and boundaries need the appropriate representation.
One route with a recorded decision
Atlas applies a governed interface to durable memory roles and their storage backends. Active working state reaches inference through Reckoning.
Trust and provenance connect those backends: record identity, permitted access and the history of promotion or consolidation travel with the material. A capability declaration does not expose the memory contents.
Reproducible routing requires the relevant policy, registry and state versions as well as the query. Recording those inputs helps distinguish a routing change from a changed source or model response. It does not make an incorrect memory correct.
Consolidation, retention and retrieval policies remain workload-specific choices. Atlas’s role is to apply the declared contract and preserve the record needed to inspect those choices.
