agent-working-memory 0.17.0 → 0.18.1

package/README.md

@@ -1,319 +1,321 @@
-# AgentWorkingMemory (AWM)
-
-**Give your AI coding agent a memory that survives the conversation — and knows when to stay quiet.**
-
-Every session with an AI assistant starts blank. It has forgotten what your team decided last
-week, which approach was tried and rejected, and which table actually holds the thing it needs.
-So it re-derives all of it — reading files, running searches, asking you — and on a large project
-it will confidently rebuild something that was already decided against.
-
-AWM fixes that with one local process and one SQLite file. The agent writes short notes as it
-learns; AWM decides which are worth keeping, hands back the two or three that matter when asked,
-and says **nothing** when nothing fits.
-
-```bash
-npm install -g agent-working-memory && awm setup --global
-```
-
-Restart Claude Code. 19 tools appear. No cloud, no API keys, nothing leaves your machine.
-
-<p align="center">
-  <a href="https://github.com/CompleteIdeas/agent-working-memory/blob/master/docs/for-decision-makers.md"><b>Deciding whether to adopt it? →</b></a> &nbsp;·&nbsp;
-  <a href="https://github.com/CompleteIdeas/agent-working-memory/blob/master/docs/walkthrough.md"><b>Want the mechanism walked through? →</b></a> &nbsp;·&nbsp;
-  <a href="https://completeideas.github.io/agent-working-memory/"><b>Docs site →</b></a> &nbsp;·&nbsp;
-  <a href="https://github.com/CompleteIdeas/agent-working-memory/blob/master/llms.txt"><b>Are you an LLM? Read llms.txt →</b></a>
-</p>
-
----
-
-## What it does, measured
-
-Measured against a frozen copy of a **real work store — 29,853 engrams, 11,262 of them
-retrievable**, which is the honest denominator for a retrieval score. Not synthetic data, and
-not a corpus we can publish: it is a real store with real colleagues and real decisions in it,
-so it is gitignored and so is everything derived from it.
-
-What you *can* run: **`npm run bench:public`** scores the same runner through the same
-ground-truth derivation against a synthetic corpus you rebuild yourself. It verifies the method,
-not the figures — a synthetic corpus scores lower. Current numbers, stamped with the commit that
-produced them, are in [`docs/benchmarks-current.md`](docs/benchmarks-current.md); every claim
-below, what produced it, and **who can reproduce it** is in [`docs/claims.md`](docs/claims.md),
-including the ones we think are weakest.
-
-| | |
-|---|---|
-| **Returns the right memory first** | **93.0%** of identifier queries · **92.2%** of topic queries · **97.0%** in the top five |
-| **Stays silent when it should** | **90.0%** correct abstention on questions about facts never stored |
-| **Costs the same at any scale** | Scoped recall answers in **~630 tokens flat**. Carrying the store instead: ~1.3M tokens |
-| **Lets a cheap model punch up** | Small model + AWM beat a frontier model on a 15-task domain workload: **14/15 vs 7/15**, at ~1/40th the cost |
-
-Two independently built fixtures agree within a point. Warm recall takes about half a second.
-
-<details>
-<summary>Two more, from real work rather than fixtures</summary>
-
-**Halves the digging.** Same agent, same tools, four real support tickets: with memory, 2× the
-specific facts the real answer needed and half the database queries (49 vs 100). On one ticket
-the memoryless arm ran 25 queries, exhausted its budget and answered nothing; the memory arm
-answered in 4.
-
-**Holds decisions for months.** On a six-month application project, recorded decisions were
-recalled a median of 30 days after being written — some after 167. 41% of the technical
-identifiers the agent used had entered the conversation *only* through a recall.
-</details>
-
----
-
-## Is this for you?
-
-The honest version, because the overhead is real and it does not pay back for everyone.
-
-| If you are… | What you actually get | It pays back when |
-|---|---|---|
-| **A solo developer on one long-lived project** | The agent stops re-asking what you already told it, and stops re-proposing approaches you rejected | The project outgrows the context window — roughly, when you start saying "I have explained this before" |
-| **A team sharing conventions** | One pool where a decision written by anyone is recalled by everyone, with corrections superseding rather than accumulating | More than one person is steering agents at the same codebase |
-| **Running support or operations agents** | Ticket-scoped recall by real identifiers, so the second agent to touch a ticket knows what the first one did | Work arrives as a queue that several sessions or people share |
-| **Building multi-agent pipelines** | A shared substrate with per-agent scoping, so specialists cooperate without sharing one context window | You have specialised agents that need the same facts |
-| **Cost-constrained** | A small local model with good recall beats a frontier model without it on domain work | Your workload is narrow and repetitive rather than novel each time |
-| **Somewhere cloud memory is not allowed** | One SQLite file on the machine. No account, no telemetry, no egress | Compliance makes hosted memory a non-starter |
-
-**Skip it if:** your tasks are short and one-off with nothing worth reusing; you want a hosted
-service someone else operates; you need memory synced across machines out of the box; or you were
-hoping to replace your code, tickets and docs as the source of truth. AWM is a fast path back to
-what was already decided — recall first, verify against the source when it matters, supersede when
-reality differs.
-
-It is also **not** a chatbot, a generic vector database, or a RAG pipeline over your files.
-
----
-
-## Get started
-
-```bash
-npm install -g agent-working-memory
-awm setup --global          # MCP config, CLAUDE.md guidance, hooks
-```
-
-Or install it as a Claude Code plugin instead, which wires the same things without a setup
-step. The npm package carries the plugin, so this needs no GitHub access:
-
-```bash
-awm plugin                  # prints the two lines to paste, with the path on your machine
-```
-
-Both share one store at `~/.awm/memory.db`, so it is a preference, not a fork — the
-trade-offs are in [`docs/plugin.md`](docs/plugin.md). Install the npm package either way.
-
-Requires **Node.js 22+**. Restart Claude Code.
-
-**What to expect.** The first conversation takes minutes rather than seconds while three ONNX
-models download — **~600 MB** once, into a local cache (134 MB embedder + 92 MB reranker + 377 MB
-query expander; nothing is bundled in the package). After that the agent has 19 memory tools, and the hooks save state on compaction
-and session end without you doing anything. For the first day or two recall will be thin — it only
-knows what has been written. That is the normal shape of it, not a fault.
-
-**Starting on an existing project?** Warm-start the store from its own docs so recall is useful on
-day one:
-
-```bash
-awm onboard ./docs --repo . --project <name>    # review the pack, then
-awm import <pack> --db <path> --dedupe
-```
-
-**Turn on the three retrieval improvements.** They ship default-off and belong together:
-
-```bash
-AWM_RERANK2=1 AWM_RERANK_WINDOW=query AWM_RERANK_TAGS=1
-```
-
-Second-stage rerank by the cross-encoder's own score; a 400-character rerank window placed on the
-densest query-term region rather than the prefix (**25% → 87.5%** on long memories); and tags fed
-into the rerank passage (**+7.4pp**). `awm setup` writes them on a fresh install. `memory_whoami`
-prints the active fingerprint so you can confirm a running process has them.
-
-**Check it worked:** `awm doctor claude-code` reports the live sidecars, which agent each serves,
-and whether anything needs a re-run of setup.
-
-| Next | |
-|---|---|
-| Install, first write, first recall | [`docs/quickstart.md`](docs/quickstart.md) |
-| Separate pools per project, incognito mode, hooks | [`docs/claude-code-setup.md`](docs/claude-code-setup.md) |
-| As a Claude Code plugin | [`docs/plugin.md`](docs/plugin.md) |
-| In Claude Desktop | [`docs/desktop.md`](docs/desktop.md) |
-| Teams and multi-agent | [`docs/team-setup-guide.md`](docs/team-setup-guide.md) |
-| Custom agents over HTTP | [`docs/reference.md`](docs/reference.md) |
-
----
-
-## Upgrading
-
-```bash
-npm install -g agent-working-memory@latest
-```
-
-**That alone is not enough** — it updates the engine, not the wiring. Do the second step for
-however you installed it:
-
-| Installed as | Second step |
-|---|---|
-| CLI (`awm setup`) | `awm setup --global` again. It upgrades in place: your database, agent id, ports and any env you set are all preserved |
-| Claude Code plugin | `/plugin marketplace update agent-working-memory` then `/plugin install awm@agent-working-memory` |
-| Claude Desktop | Rebuild the `.mcpb` and re-install it |
-
-Then **restart Claude Code** (or Desktop). A running MCP connection keeps the code it loaded
-at spawn time, so nothing changes until a fresh session starts.
-
-**A plugin marketplace installed from a local directory does not refresh itself.** Measured:
-a GitHub-sourced marketplace on one machine refreshed on a schedule, while a directory-sourced
-one had not moved in 167 days. Since the npm route registers a directory marketplace, the
-`/plugin marketplace update` line above is required, not optional — skip it and you get new
-engine code with old hooks, which half-works and is confusing for it.
-
-```
-memory_whoami
-```
-
-reports the version, store and agent the running process **actually** has. It is the fastest
-way to confirm an upgrade landed, and the only one that cannot be fooled by a stale cache.
-
-Your memories are not touched by any of this. Every release so far has been backward
-compatible, and the store is the same SQLite file before and after.
-
----
-
-## What's new — v0.17.0
-
-| | |
-|---|---|
-| **0.17.0** | `AWM_FEEDBACK_NAMES` shipped a **list of 22 real first names** as its built-in default — one deployment's staff list, published in every npm tarball because `src/` is in `files`. It now ships empty, which turns user-feedback auto-promotion off until an operator configures it; **breaking if you relied on the built-in list**, and the migration is one env var. Separately, `memory_write`'s `supersedes` argument was silently discarded whenever reinforce-on-duplicate fired — which is every correction, since a correction restates what it corrects and therefore matches on concept. The engram you asked to retire stayed live, with your correction merged into it. Re-run `awm setup` for the corrected guidance |
-| **0.16.1** | A tokenizer option the reranker had been passing since 0.5.2 turned out never to have existed in transformers.js — silently ignored for six months, and the library default was what the code wanted anyway, so no ranking behavior changes. Found by a dependency sweep that also clears every advisory in the published tree: an install of 0.16.0 audits at 7 (3 high), this one at **0**. Accuracy reproduced identically across two transformers majors, token spend to the token |
-| **0.16.0** | Two recall defaults changed, each after being measured for the first time. A pseudo-relevance feedback pass that ran on **every** query is now opt-in — it cost 7% of every recall and bought nothing measurable across 950 probes. A reranker shortcut that had never once fired on any store benchmarked here is deleted; forced on, it cost success@1 93.0% → 91.7%. Identifier recall is now **93.0%** success@1 / **97.0%** success@5. Re-run `awm setup` for the corrected agent guidance |
-| **0.15.9** | A memory that consolidation archived as a near-duplicate — even at high confidence — could never be reinforced again, so the same recurring fact kept spawning new copies instead of strengthening one. An archived match is now revived on reinforcement |
-| **0.15.6–8** | **Data-loss fix.** The default store used to sit inside the installed npm package, where `npm install -g` deletes it on upgrade. It is now `~/.awm/memory.db`; re-running `awm setup` copies an affected store to safety and `awm doctor` fails on it. 0.15.7 corrects the docs that still taught the old location |
-| **0.15.x** | Runs as a **Claude Code plugin** and a **Claude Desktop extension**, both sharing one store with the CLI. Installs from npm with no GitHub access — `awm plugin` prints the two lines to paste. Every write now records which client produced it (`client=claude-code`) |
-| **0.14.6** | `awm setup` caught up with four releases of engine changes it had silently fallen behind. Added the release checks that now block on that kind of drift |
-| **0.14.5** | Benchmark instrument corrected: the eval had been querying as the wrong agent, so a product feature scored as a ranking failure. The real identifier baseline is **92.7%**, not 68% |
-| **0.14.2** | Each session's sidecar binds the first free port instead of giving up, so several projects can run at once |
-| **0.14.1** | An empty recall says `RECALL ABSTAINED` with the withheld count, rather than claiming the memory is absent |
-
-Full history, including every benchmark figure that was corrected and why:
-[CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md).
-
----
-
-## Why it works when a vector store doesn't
-
-Most "memory for AI" stores everything and retrieves by similarity. AWM makes the opposite bet:
-**a memory is only useful if it is selective.**
-
-**It refuses most of what it sees.** Every write is scored for importance before storage — is it
-new, is it a decision or a root cause, does it name its subject? About a third of what the agent
-offers is kept at full confidence. The rest never competes, so recall stays sharp as the store
-grows.
-
-**It forgets gracefully.** Memories that keep getting used stay strong; ones nobody touches fade
-from ranking without being deleted. The model is borrowed from cognitive science (ACT-R), and it
-means no one curates the store.
-
-**It tells you when it doesn't know.** When the top candidates are only marginally better than the
-tenth, AWM returns nothing and says how many it withheld. A confident wrong memory is more
-expensive than an admitted gap — the benchmark scores the silence as a win.
-
-**It knows what changed.** When a fact is corrected, the old memory is marked superseded and
-carries a visible warning if it ever surfaces. A notes file has two paragraphs that read with equal
-confidence; AWM knows which one won. One project has 108 such supersessions — an agent resuming it
-gets one current state, not five.
-
-**It stays local and per-person.** One SQLite file, three small ONNX models. Work and personal
-memories are separate pools; several sessions share a pool safely.
-
-<details>
-<summary>Against a typical RAG / vector store, feature by feature</summary>
-
-| | Typical vector store | AWM |
-|---|---|---|
-| Storage | Everything | Salience-filtered: active / staging / low-confidence fallback |
-| Retrieval | Cosine similarity | Keyword + vector candidates → liveness scoring → cross-encoder rerank → abstention gate |
-| Forgetting | Manual cleanup | ACT-R decay; reinforced knowledge persists |
-| Correction | Delete and re-insert | Supersede with a visible pointer; retract with confidence propagation to neighbours |
-| Duplicates | Stored again | Reinforce the existing memory instead |
-| Wrong answers | Best of a bad set | Returns nothing, says why |
-| Named things | Vocabulary-dependent | Entity index on tickets, people, tables, files |
-| Feedback | None | Useful / not-useful adjusts confidence and rank |
-| Multi-agent | Per-instance | Shared store, per-agent scoping, opt-in shared workspace |
-</details>
-
----
-
-## How it works, in one paragraph
-
-A write is scored for salience — novelty against the existing store, event type, whether it names
-identifiers — and lands active, staged, or low-confidence. A recall casts a wide net with keyword
-and vector search, scores each candidate for relevance and liveness, lets linked memories vote,
-hands the shortlist to a cross-encoder that actually reads the text, then checks whether the score
-distribution justifies answering at all. A maintenance pass on session end clusters, decays unused
-links, and archives what has gone cold. Corrections supersede rather than overwrite.
-
-The whole thing, one memory followed end to end with every threshold sourced:
-[`docs/walkthrough.md`](docs/walkthrough.md). The mental model an engineer needs to predict its
-behaviour — proposers, deciders, and when it stays silent:
-[`How AWM decides what to say`](https://completeideas.github.io/agent-working-memory/pipeline-walkthrough.html).
-The theory and its citations: [`docs/cognitive-model.md`](docs/cognitive-model.md).
-
----
-
-## Honest limits
-
-- No help on small one-off tasks — the overhead pays back when knowledge is reused or the project
-  outgrows the context window.
-- Recall is bounded by what was written. A memory that never names its subject cannot be found by
-  it. The writing guidance exists for this reason.
-- The association graph, as of this release, rarely changes a final answer; the reranker does.
-- It is 0.x. Benchmark figures have been corrected upward more than once after the *instrument*
-  turned out to be wrong; every correction is documented in place rather than revised away.
-
-Everything else, with evidence and workarounds: [`docs/known-limitations.md`](docs/known-limitations.md).
-
----
-
-## Reference
-
-The README points outward; it does not duplicate. Everything below is the authoritative source.
-
-| | |
-|---|---|
-| **All 19 MCP tools**, most HTTP endpoints with schemas (21 of 28 — the batch-write, checkpoint, export, agent-register and system routes are not yet written up), every environment variable with its measured effect | [`docs/reference.md`](docs/reference.md) |
-| Architecture, pipelines, schema, backends (SQLite · PGlite · Postgres) | [`docs/architecture.md`](docs/architecture.md) · [`docs/pglite-feature-parity.md`](docs/pglite-feature-parity.md) |
-| Current benchmark numbers, generated and stamped | [`docs/benchmarks-current.md`](docs/benchmarks-current.md) |
-| What each eval suite measures, and the measurement caveats | [`docs/benchmarks.md`](docs/benchmarks.md) |
-| Building an agent on AWM as a substrate (PRIME → ACT → VERIFY → LEARN) | [`docs/patterns/awm-native-harness.md`](docs/patterns/awm-native-harness.md) · [agent playbook](https://completeideas.github.io/agent-working-memory/awm-for-agents.html) |
-| Running it as a service; backup, restore, migration | [`docs/deployment.md`](docs/deployment.md) |
-| Behaviour as the store grows | [`docs/using-awm-at-scale.md`](docs/using-awm-at-scale.md) |
-| The vocabulary — engram, salience, activation, Hebbian, staging | [`docs/onboarding-vocabulary.md`](docs/onboarding-vocabulary.md) |
-| When something is wrong | [`docs/troubleshooting.md`](docs/troubleshooting.md) |
-| Full index | [`docs/README.md`](docs/README.md) |
-
-**Stack:** TypeScript · SQLite + FTS5 (or PGlite / Postgres) · Fastify · `@modelcontextprotocol/sdk` ·
-local ONNX via `@huggingface/transformers` — bge-small-en-v1.5 embeddings, ms-marco-MiniLM cross-encoder,
-flan-t5-small expansion. Node 22+.
-
-```bash
-npx vitest run          # 810 tests
-npm run bench           # benchmark suites
-npm run build:plugin    # regenerate the Claude Code plugin from src/
-npm run test:docker     # clean-room install of the packed tarball
-npm run test:linux      # build + full suite on Linux (810/810)
-```
-
----
-
-## Status
-
-Active development, v0.17.0. Core retrieval, consolidation, MCP integration, hooks, task
-management, and the HTTP API are stable and in daily production use. PGlite backend stable;
-networked Postgres experimental.
-
-Release notes, and every benchmark correction recorded against the release that made it:
-[CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md).
-
-**License:** Apache 2.0 — [LICENSE](LICENSE) · [NOTICE](NOTICE)
+# AgentWorkingMemory (AWM)
+
+**Give your AI coding agent a memory that survives the conversation — and knows when to stay quiet.**
+
+Every session with an AI assistant starts blank. It has forgotten what your team decided last
+week, which approach was tried and rejected, and which table actually holds the thing it needs.
+So it re-derives all of it — reading files, running searches, asking you — and on a large project
+it will confidently rebuild something that was already decided against.
+
+AWM fixes that with one local process and one SQLite file. The agent writes short notes as it
+learns; AWM decides which are worth keeping, hands back the two or three that matter when asked,
+and says **nothing** when nothing fits.
+
+```bash
+npm install -g agent-working-memory && awm setup --global
+```
+
+Restart Claude Code. 19 tools appear. No cloud, no API keys, nothing leaves your machine.
+
+<p align="center">
+  <a href="https://github.com/CompleteIdeas/agent-working-memory/blob/master/docs/for-decision-makers.md"><b>Deciding whether to adopt it? →</b></a> &nbsp;·&nbsp;
+  <a href="https://github.com/CompleteIdeas/agent-working-memory/blob/master/docs/walkthrough.md"><b>Want the mechanism walked through? →</b></a> &nbsp;·&nbsp;
+  <a href="https://completeideas.github.io/agent-working-memory/"><b>Docs site →</b></a> &nbsp;·&nbsp;
+  <a href="https://github.com/CompleteIdeas/agent-working-memory/blob/master/llms.txt"><b>Are you an LLM? Read llms.txt →</b></a>
+</p>
+
+---
+
+## What it does, measured
+
+Measured against a frozen copy of a **real work store — 29,853 engrams, 11,262 of them
+retrievable**, which is the honest denominator for a retrieval score. Not synthetic data, and
+not a corpus we can publish: it is a real store with real colleagues and real decisions in it,
+so it is gitignored and so is everything derived from it.
+
+What you *can* run: **`npm run bench:public`** scores the same runner through the same
+ground-truth derivation against a synthetic corpus you rebuild yourself. It verifies the method,
+not the figures — a synthetic corpus scores lower. Current numbers, stamped with the commit that
+produced them, are in [`docs/benchmarks-current.md`](docs/benchmarks-current.md); every claim
+below, what produced it, and **who can reproduce it** is in [`docs/claims.md`](docs/claims.md),
+including the ones we think are weakest.
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| **Returns the right memory first** | **93.0%** of identifier queries · **92.2%** of topic queries · **97.0%** in the top five |
+| **Stays silent when it should** | **90.0%** correct abstention on questions about facts never stored |
+| **Costs the same at any scale** | Scoped recall answers in **~630 tokens flat**. Carrying the store instead: ~1.3M tokens |
+| **Lets a cheap model punch up** | Small model + AWM beat a frontier model on a 15-task domain workload: **14/15 vs 7/15**, at ~1/40th the cost |
+
+Two independently built fixtures agree within a point. Warm recall takes about half a second.
+
+<details>
+<summary>Two more, from real work rather than fixtures</summary>
+
+**Halves the digging.** Same agent, same tools, four real support tickets: with memory, 2× the
+specific facts the real answer needed and half the database queries (49 vs 100). On one ticket
+the memoryless arm ran 25 queries, exhausted its budget and answered nothing; the memory arm
+answered in 4.
+
+**Holds decisions for months.** On a six-month application project, recorded decisions were
+recalled a median of 30 days after being written — some after 167. 41% of the technical
+identifiers the agent used had entered the conversation *only* through a recall.
+</details>
+
+---
+
+## Is this for you?
+
+The honest version, because the overhead is real and it does not pay back for everyone.
+
+| If you are… | What you actually get | It pays back when |
+|---|---|---|
+| **A solo developer on one long-lived project** | The agent stops re-asking what you already told it, and stops re-proposing approaches you rejected | The project outgrows the context window — roughly, when you start saying "I have explained this before" |
+| **A team sharing conventions** | One pool where a decision written by anyone is recalled by everyone, with corrections superseding rather than accumulating | More than one person is steering agents at the same codebase |
+| **Running support or operations agents** | Ticket-scoped recall by real identifiers, so the second agent to touch a ticket knows what the first one did | Work arrives as a queue that several sessions or people share |
+| **Building multi-agent pipelines** | A shared substrate with per-agent scoping, so specialists cooperate without sharing one context window | You have specialised agents that need the same facts |
+| **Cost-constrained** | A small local model with good recall beats a frontier model without it on domain work | Your workload is narrow and repetitive rather than novel each time |
+| **Somewhere cloud memory is not allowed** | One SQLite file on the machine. No account, no telemetry, no egress | Compliance makes hosted memory a non-starter |
+
+**Skip it if:** your tasks are short and one-off with nothing worth reusing; you want a hosted
+service someone else operates; you need memory synced across machines out of the box; or you were
+hoping to replace your code, tickets and docs as the source of truth. AWM is a fast path back to
+what was already decided — recall first, verify against the source when it matters, supersede when
+reality differs.
+
+It is also **not** a chatbot, a generic vector database, or a RAG pipeline over your files.
+
+---
+
+## Get started
+
+```bash
+npm install -g agent-working-memory
+awm setup --global          # MCP config, CLAUDE.md guidance, hooks
+```
+
+Or install it as a Claude Code plugin instead, which wires the same things without a setup
+step. The npm package carries the plugin, so this needs no GitHub access:
+
+```bash
+awm plugin                  # prints the two lines to paste, with the path on your machine
+```
+
+Both share one store at `~/.awm/memory.db`, so it is a preference, not a fork — the
+trade-offs are in [`docs/plugin.md`](docs/plugin.md). Install the npm package either way.
+
+Requires **Node.js 22+**. Restart Claude Code.
+
+**What to expect.** The first conversation takes minutes rather than seconds while three ONNX
+models download — **~600 MB** once, into a local cache (134 MB embedder + 92 MB reranker + 377 MB
+query expander; nothing is bundled in the package). After that the agent has 19 memory tools, and the hooks save state on compaction
+and session end without you doing anything. For the first day or two recall will be thin — it only
+knows what has been written. That is the normal shape of it, not a fault.
+
+**Starting on an existing project?** Warm-start the store from its own docs so recall is useful on
+day one:
+
+```bash
+awm onboard ./docs --repo . --project <name>    # review the pack, then
+awm import <pack> --db <path> --dedupe
+```
+
+**Turn on the three retrieval improvements.** They ship default-off and belong together:
+
+```bash
+AWM_RERANK2=1 AWM_RERANK_WINDOW=query AWM_RERANK_TAGS=1
+```
+
+Second-stage rerank by the cross-encoder's own score; a 400-character rerank window placed on the
+densest query-term region rather than the prefix (**25% → 87.5%** on long memories); and tags fed
+into the rerank passage (**+7.4pp**). `awm setup` writes them on a fresh install. `memory_whoami`
+prints the active fingerprint so you can confirm a running process has them.
+
+**Check it worked:** `awm doctor claude-code` reports the live sidecars, which agent each serves,
+and whether anything needs a re-run of setup.
+
+| Next | |
+|---|---|
+| Install, first write, first recall | [`docs/quickstart.md`](docs/quickstart.md) |
+| Separate pools per project, incognito mode, hooks | [`docs/claude-code-setup.md`](docs/claude-code-setup.md) |
+| As a Claude Code plugin | [`docs/plugin.md`](docs/plugin.md) |
+| In Claude Desktop | [`docs/desktop.md`](docs/desktop.md) |
+| Teams and multi-agent | [`docs/team-setup-guide.md`](docs/team-setup-guide.md) |
+| Custom agents over HTTP | [`docs/reference.md`](docs/reference.md) |
+
+---
+
+## Upgrading
+
+```bash
+npm install -g agent-working-memory@latest
+```
+
+**That alone is not enough** — it updates the engine, not the wiring. Do the second step for
+however you installed it:
+
+| Installed as | Second step |
+|---|---|
+| CLI (`awm setup`) | `awm setup --global` again. It upgrades in place: your database, agent id, ports and any env you set are all preserved |
+| Claude Code plugin | `/plugin marketplace update agent-working-memory` then `/plugin install awm@agent-working-memory` |
+| Claude Desktop | Rebuild the `.mcpb` and re-install it |
+
+Then **restart Claude Code** (or Desktop). A running MCP connection keeps the code it loaded
+at spawn time, so nothing changes until a fresh session starts.
+
+**A plugin marketplace installed from a local directory does not refresh itself.** Measured:
+a GitHub-sourced marketplace on one machine refreshed on a schedule, while a directory-sourced
+one had not moved in 167 days. Since the npm route registers a directory marketplace, the
+`/plugin marketplace update` line above is required, not optional — skip it and you get new
+engine code with old hooks, which half-works and is confusing for it.
+
+```
+memory_whoami
+```
+
+reports the version, store and agent the running process **actually** has. It is the fastest
+way to confirm an upgrade landed, and the only one that cannot be fooled by a stale cache.
+
+Your memories are not touched by any of this. Every release so far has been backward
+compatible, and the store is the same SQLite file before and after.
+
+---
+
+## What's new — v0.18.1
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| **0.18.1** | Two defects MWA found within hours of the 0.18 defaults. A bare month after a preposition ("in October") now counts as a date for the conflict detector, so three versions of one fact are marked with newer/older. Two attempts to make the engine put the newest first were **measured and rejected**: a reranker-score epsilon cost identifier s@1 93.0% → 78.7%, and reordering on conflict marks cost 93.0% → 74.7% with s@5 unchanged. Marks are a cue to check the source, not a verdict on rank; `newestFirstAmongConflicts` is exported for harnesses whose policy is "newer beats older". Ranking is unchanged from 0.18.0. |
+| **0.18.0** | A superseded memory could **outrank its successor** whenever `AWM_RERANK2=1` — the setting `awm setup` writes everywhere — because the second-stage re-sort ignored the supersession penalty; fixed, with the test run reranker-on. `valid_to` now actually expires (it was display-only; the live store served 482 expired memories as current). Every recall line carries its **written date**, two versions of one fact are **marked as a possible conflict** with the newer one named, recall **confidence** is printed on every reply, and when the question asks for a time, date, amount, count or status that no returned memory holds, the reply says so instead of leaving the gap. `memory_write` takes **`correction: true`** to supersede by intent without the old id. The three measured rerank wins are **code defaults** (`=0` / `=prefix` to disable). A less-trusted write (`trust=` tag) **never merges into or retires a more-trusted memory**. Also: the model-memory fixes (ONNX arena bound, optional shared model daemon), the prime hook recalls with the prompt's question rather than its paste, and seven lifecycle fixes (PR #7). |
+| **0.17.0** | `AWM_FEEDBACK_NAMES` shipped a **list of 22 real first names** as its built-in default — one deployment's staff list, published in every npm tarball because `src/` is in `files`. It now ships empty, which turns user-feedback auto-promotion off until an operator configures it; **breaking if you relied on the built-in list**, and the migration is one env var. Separately, `memory_write`'s `supersedes` argument was silently discarded whenever reinforce-on-duplicate fired — which is every correction, since a correction restates what it corrects and therefore matches on concept. The engram you asked to retire stayed live, with your correction merged into it. Re-run `awm setup` for the corrected guidance |
+| **0.16.1** | A tokenizer option the reranker had been passing since 0.5.2 turned out never to have existed in transformers.js — silently ignored for six months, and the library default was what the code wanted anyway, so no ranking behavior changes. Found by a dependency sweep that also clears every advisory in the published tree: an install of 0.16.0 audits at 7 (3 high), this one at **0**. Accuracy reproduced identically across two transformers majors, token spend to the token |
+| **0.16.0** | Two recall defaults changed, each after being measured for the first time. A pseudo-relevance feedback pass that ran on **every** query is now opt-in — it cost 7% of every recall and bought nothing measurable across 950 probes. A reranker shortcut that had never once fired on any store benchmarked here is deleted; forced on, it cost success@1 93.0% → 91.7%. Identifier recall is now **93.0%** success@1 / **97.0%** success@5. Re-run `awm setup` for the corrected agent guidance |
+| **0.15.9** | A memory that consolidation archived as a near-duplicate — even at high confidence — could never be reinforced again, so the same recurring fact kept spawning new copies instead of strengthening one. An archived match is now revived on reinforcement |
+| **0.15.6–8** | **Data-loss fix.** The default store used to sit inside the installed npm package, where `npm install -g` deletes it on upgrade. It is now `~/.awm/memory.db`; re-running `awm setup` copies an affected store to safety and `awm doctor` fails on it. 0.15.7 corrects the docs that still taught the old location |
+| **0.15.x** | Runs as a **Claude Code plugin** and a **Claude Desktop extension**, both sharing one store with the CLI. Installs from npm with no GitHub access — `awm plugin` prints the two lines to paste. Every write now records which client produced it (`client=claude-code`) |
+| **0.14.6** | `awm setup` caught up with four releases of engine changes it had silently fallen behind. Added the release checks that now block on that kind of drift |
+| **0.14.5** | Benchmark instrument corrected: the eval had been querying as the wrong agent, so a product feature scored as a ranking failure. The real identifier baseline is **92.7%**, not 68% |
+| **0.14.2** | Each session's sidecar binds the first free port instead of giving up, so several projects can run at once |
+| **0.14.1** | An empty recall says `RECALL ABSTAINED` with the withheld count, rather than claiming the memory is absent |
+
+Full history, including every benchmark figure that was corrected and why:
+[CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md).
+
+---
+
+## Why it works when a vector store doesn't
+
+Most "memory for AI" stores everything and retrieves by similarity. AWM makes the opposite bet:
+**a memory is only useful if it is selective.**
+
+**It refuses most of what it sees.** Every write is scored for importance before storage — is it
+new, is it a decision or a root cause, does it name its subject? About a third of what the agent
+offers is kept at full confidence. The rest never competes, so recall stays sharp as the store
+grows.
+
+**It forgets gracefully.** Memories that keep getting used stay strong; ones nobody touches fade
+from ranking without being deleted. The model is borrowed from cognitive science (ACT-R), and it
+means no one curates the store.
+
+**It tells you when it doesn't know.** When the top candidates are only marginally better than the
+tenth, AWM returns nothing and says how many it withheld. A confident wrong memory is more
+expensive than an admitted gap — the benchmark scores the silence as a win.
+
+**It knows what changed.** When a fact is corrected, the old memory is marked superseded and
+carries a visible warning if it ever surfaces. A notes file has two paragraphs that read with equal
+confidence; AWM knows which one won. One project has 108 such supersessions — an agent resuming it
+gets one current state, not five.
+
+**It stays local and per-person.** One SQLite file, three small ONNX models. Work and personal
+memories are separate pools; several sessions share a pool safely.
+
+<details>
+<summary>Against a typical RAG / vector store, feature by feature</summary>
+
+| | Typical vector store | AWM |
+|---|---|---|
+| Storage | Everything | Salience-filtered: active / staging / low-confidence fallback |
+| Retrieval | Cosine similarity | Keyword + vector candidates → liveness scoring → cross-encoder rerank → abstention gate |
+| Forgetting | Manual cleanup | ACT-R decay; reinforced knowledge persists |
+| Correction | Delete and re-insert | Supersede with a visible pointer; retract with confidence propagation to neighbours |
+| Duplicates | Stored again | Reinforce the existing memory instead |
+| Wrong answers | Best of a bad set | Returns nothing, says why |
+| Named things | Vocabulary-dependent | Entity index on tickets, people, tables, files |
+| Feedback | None | Useful / not-useful adjusts confidence and rank |
+| Multi-agent | Per-instance | Shared store, per-agent scoping, opt-in shared workspace |
+</details>
+
+---
+
+## How it works, in one paragraph
+
+A write is scored for salience — novelty against the existing store, event type, whether it names
+identifiers — and lands active, staged, or low-confidence. A recall casts a wide net with keyword
+and vector search, scores each candidate for relevance and liveness, lets linked memories vote,
+hands the shortlist to a cross-encoder that actually reads the text, then checks whether the score
+distribution justifies answering at all. A maintenance pass on session end clusters, decays unused
+links, and archives what has gone cold. Corrections supersede rather than overwrite.
+
+The whole thing, one memory followed end to end with every threshold sourced:
+[`docs/walkthrough.md`](docs/walkthrough.md). The mental model an engineer needs to predict its
+behaviour — proposers, deciders, and when it stays silent:
+[`How AWM decides what to say`](https://completeideas.github.io/agent-working-memory/pipeline-walkthrough.html).
+The theory and its citations: [`docs/cognitive-model.md`](docs/cognitive-model.md).
+
+---
+
+## Honest limits
+
+- No help on small one-off tasks — the overhead pays back when knowledge is reused or the project
+  outgrows the context window.
+- Recall is bounded by what was written. A memory that never names its subject cannot be found by
+  it. The writing guidance exists for this reason.
+- The association graph, as of this release, rarely changes a final answer; the reranker does.
+- It is 0.x. Benchmark figures have been corrected upward more than once after the *instrument*
+  turned out to be wrong; every correction is documented in place rather than revised away.
+
+Everything else, with evidence and workarounds: [`docs/known-limitations.md`](docs/known-limitations.md).
+
+---
+
+## Reference
+
+The README points outward; it does not duplicate. Everything below is the authoritative source.
+
+| | |
+|---|---|
+| **All 19 MCP tools**, most HTTP endpoints with schemas (21 of 28 — the batch-write, checkpoint, export, agent-register and system routes are not yet written up), every environment variable with its measured effect | [`docs/reference.md`](docs/reference.md) |
+| Architecture, pipelines, schema, backends (SQLite · PGlite · Postgres) | [`docs/architecture.md`](docs/architecture.md) · [`docs/pglite-feature-parity.md`](docs/pglite-feature-parity.md) |
+| Current benchmark numbers, generated and stamped | [`docs/benchmarks-current.md`](docs/benchmarks-current.md) |
+| What each eval suite measures, and the measurement caveats | [`docs/benchmarks.md`](docs/benchmarks.md) |
+| Building an agent on AWM as a substrate (PRIME → ACT → VERIFY → LEARN) | [`docs/patterns/awm-native-harness.md`](docs/patterns/awm-native-harness.md) · [agent playbook](https://completeideas.github.io/agent-working-memory/awm-for-agents.html) |
+| Running it as a service; backup, restore, migration | [`docs/deployment.md`](docs/deployment.md) |
+| Behaviour as the store grows | [`docs/using-awm-at-scale.md`](docs/using-awm-at-scale.md) |
+| The vocabulary — engram, salience, activation, Hebbian, staging | [`docs/onboarding-vocabulary.md`](docs/onboarding-vocabulary.md) |
+| When something is wrong | [`docs/troubleshooting.md`](docs/troubleshooting.md) |
+| Full index | [`docs/README.md`](docs/README.md) |
+
+**Stack:** TypeScript · SQLite + FTS5 (or PGlite / Postgres) · Fastify · `@modelcontextprotocol/sdk` ·
+local ONNX via `@huggingface/transformers` — bge-small-en-v1.5 embeddings, ms-marco-MiniLM cross-encoder,
+flan-t5-small expansion. Node 22+.
+
+```bash
+npx vitest run          # 1066 tests
+npm run bench           # benchmark suites
+npm run build:plugin    # regenerate the Claude Code plugin from src/
+npm run test:docker     # clean-room install of the packed tarball
+npm run test:linux      # build + full suite on Linux
+```
+
+---
+
+## Status
+
+Active development, v0.18.1. Core retrieval, consolidation, MCP integration, hooks, task
+management, and the HTTP API are stable and in daily production use. PGlite backend stable;
+networked Postgres experimental.
+
+Release notes, and every benchmark correction recorded against the release that made it:
+[CHANGELOG.md](CHANGELOG.md).
+
+**License:** Apache 2.0 — [LICENSE](LICENSE) · [NOTICE](NOTICE)