Skip to content
Spectral Codex
GitHub
Decisions

ADR-018: Memory system redesign — three tiers, world signal path

Status: Accepted (2026-04-20; World Agent tier vocabulary partially superseded by ADR-058 — Spectral-side T1/T2/T3 framing carries forward unchanged)

Source: migrated from planning/swms-decisions.md ADR-027 as part of SPEC-270.

Context

Spectral’s 5-tier hierarchical memory system was designed to compound learning upward through increasingly broad scopes, culminating in Tier 5 global memory that fed back into evaluation framework templates. With SWMS as the authoritative source of evaluation frameworks, Tier 5’s primary output channel is replaced by world model evolution. Tier 4 was largely colonized by domain observations that, in the new design, belong as signals to spectral.worlds. The distinction between agent-specific operational knowledge (legitimately platform’s) and domain observations (legitimately worlds’) clarifies what each memory tier should hold.

Decision

The memory system is redesigned from five tiers to three. Tier 1 (Cycle Memory), Tier 2 (Run Memory), and Tier 3 (Workspace Memory) are retained with their current scope definitions. Tier 4 (Account Memory) and Tier 5 (Global Memory) are retired.

The T3 promotion boundary is redesigned: instead of promoting to T4/T5, curation at T3 evaluates whether an observation is a domain observation or an agent-specific operational observation. Domain observations are surfaced as structured world signal events to packages/worlds via the event path established in ADR-017. Agent-specific operational observations that cannot be generalized beyond the workspace remain at T3.

Consequences

  • T4 and T5 are eliminated from the memory architecture and from the Codex documentation.
  • The T5 → Evaluation Framework feedback loop described in the prior Codex is replaced by the world signal event path.
  • T3 curation gains a classification step: domain observation vs. agent-specific observation.
  • World signal events from T3 curation are routed to spectral.worlds through the same event infrastructure as scan completion events (ADR-017).
  • The World Agent’s memory architecture is separate and independent from Spectral’s tiers, serving a different purpose. Tier vocabulary superseded by ADR-058; see ADR-058 for the current World Agent memory design.