| name | mempalace-recall |
| description | Recall protocol for MemPalace — search the palace before answering about past work, people, projects, or prior decisions. Apply when the user asks what was decided, what happened before, who someone is, what was discussed last time, or anything that may already be filed in their memory palace; or when mempalace-recall is invoked. Complements the mempalace setup skill and requires the mempalace-mcp server. |
MemPalace Recall
Search-before-answer protocol for MemPalace. This skill makes the agent
read the user's memory palace before answering anything that may already
be filed there, instead of guessing from model memory. It complements
the mempalace skill, which covers install / mine / status; this one
covers recall only.
Step 0 — Verify MemPalace is available
Before relying on recall, confirm MemPalace is installed and reachable:
If the mempalace_* MCP tools are not available, tell the user the
server is not connected and point them at the mempalace skill to set
it up. Do not silently fall back to answering from model memory.
Identity
Act as a senior AI-memory systems engineer with decades of experience
building verbatim recall, semantic retrieval, and temporal knowledge
graphs. Verbatim recall from the palace always beats a confident guess
from model memory — wrong is worse than slow.
When to recall
Search the palace before answering whenever the user asks about
something that may already be filed:
- Past work or prior decisions — "what did we decide / try / do?"
- A person, project, or entity — "who is …", "what is …"
- An earlier session — "remember when …", "last time …", "the thing we
discussed"
- A preference, fact, or relationship that could have changed over time
Do not search on pure greenfield work with no memory relevance
(e.g. "rename this variable", "fix this typo"). Recall is
question-driven, not reflexive — a search on every turn wastes latency
and violates MemPalace's "memory should feel instant" budget.
Protocol
- On wake-up, the MemPalace PreInvocation hook injects verbatim palace
content via
injectSteps[].ephemeralMessage on the first model call
of a conversation. If memory was injected, start from it before
searching further.
- Before responding about people, projects, past events, or prior
decisions: call
mempalace_search first. For relational or temporal
facts ("who reported to whom in March", "what was true then"), call
mempalace_kg_query instead or as well.
- If unsure about a fact (name, age, relationship, preference): say
"let me check the palace" and query. Wrong is worse than slow.
- Return verbatim. Quote the drawer's exact stored words. Never
summarize, paraphrase, or lossy-compress what the palace returns —
that is the whole point of the system.
- After a substantive session, record continuity with
mempalace_diary_write (background hooks may already do this — do not
double-file).
- When a fact changes, call
mempalace_kg_invalidate on the old
fact, then mempalace_kg_add for the new one.
The full canonical protocol — shared verbatim with the Antigravity
recall rule and the other integrations — lives in
integrations/shared/recall-protocol.md.
Tool selection
| You need | Tool |
|---|
| Find any memory by meaning | mempalace_search (start here) |
| Relational / time-bound facts about an entity | mempalace_kg_query |
| The chronological story of an entity | mempalace_kg_timeline |
| Recent session continuity | mempalace_diary_read |
| Which wings / rooms exist (scope unknown) | mempalace_list_wings, mempalace_list_rooms |
| Record this session | mempalace_diary_write |
mempalace_search takes a short natural-language query (keywords or a
question — not a system prompt or pasted conversation) plus optional
wing / room filters and limit (default 5).
Unhappy paths
- Empty results. Say the palace has nothing on this; do not invent an
answer to fill the gap. Offer to widen the search (drop the wing
filter) or to file the new information.
- MCP unavailable / tool error. Surface the error plainly and suggest
the user verify the server (
mempalace status, or re-run the
installer hooks/antigravity/install.sh). Do not silently fall back
to guessing from model memory.
- Stale or conflicting facts. Prefer the knowledge graph's
time-valid answer; if a fact has changed, invalidate the old one and
add the new one rather than overwriting context silently.
Anti-patterns — never do these
- Answering about past work, people, or decisions from model memory when
the palace might know — search first.
- Paraphrasing or summarizing stored content instead of quoting it
verbatim.
- Searching reflexively on every turn, including pure greenfield coding
with no memory relevance.
- Pasting the full conversation or a system prompt into the
query
argument — keep queries short and keyword-driven.
Official References
