Memory gardener

Persistent agent memory rots by default. Duplicates accumulate, facts go stale without anyone noticing, single items bloat into junk drawers, graph nodes orphan, and nothing ever gets summarized. Most memory systems ship the primitives for hygiene (duplicate checks, invalidation, re-linking) but nothing runs them.

This skill is the gardener: a budgeted, idempotent ceremony you run periodically over whatever memory stores the current environment exposes. It is deliberately storage-agnostic — you discover capabilities from the tool surface at the start of every run, tend what exists, skip what doesn't, and report everything. The judgment prompts for the risky calls — dedup and bloat-splitting — ship in prompts/, carried from the battle-tested nightly ceremony in EI by Jeremy Scherer (MIT).

Ground rules — the safety contract

These override anything else in this document.