conversation-memorylisted

# Conversation memory Every long conversation eventually exceeds the window, and the naive answer of dropping the oldest turns loses exactly what was established first: names, decisions, and constraints. Memory is choosing what survives. ## Method 1. **Separate durable facts from conversational flow.** Decisions, preferences, and constraints are pinned; small talk and superseded attempts are not. 2. **Summarise rolling history rather than truncating.** A running summary of older turns preserves the thread at a fraction of the tokens, and truncation loses it entirely. 3. **Keep the recent turns verbatim.** Recency matters for coherence, so the last several exchanges stay unsummarised while older ones compress. 4. **Re-summarise incrementally.** Summarising the summary each round compounds distortion, so summarise from the source turns where possible. 5. **Extract facts explicitly as they are established.** A structured note when the user states a constraint is more reliable than hoping a summary preserves it (see long-term-user-memory). 6. **Handle contradiction by recency with acknowledgement.** When the user changes their mind, the new statement wins and the change should be visible rather than silent. 7. **Show what is remembered.** Users are unsettled by a system that remembers invisibly, and a visible memory is also a correctable one. ## Boundaries Summarisation loses detail by design, and the lost detail is sometimes what matte