| name | salience-filtering |
| description | Use when deciding whether to store a memory. Fires as a gate before every remember() call. The default answer is "no" — biological memory is selective, not exhaustive. |
Cognitive Reflex: Salience Filtering
Neural Basis
The amygdala gates encoding. Only stimuli that exceed a salience threshold reach long-term storage — the rest decay within seconds. This is why you remember your first kiss but not what you had for breakfast on March 4th. A memory system that stores everything is not a memory system; it is a landfill.
McGaugh, J.L. (2004). The amygdala modulates the consolidation of memories of emotionally arousing experiences. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 27, 1-28.
When It Fires
Before every remember() call. Ask: would a human still remember this in a week?
If no — do not encode.
The Instinct
The "storage worthy" test. 6 signals, any 2 required.
| Signal | Example |
|---|
| Decision | "Using Qdrant over Pinecone because..." |
| Preference | "User prefers concise answers, no preamble" |
| Identity | "User is the developer working on a TypeScript project" |
| Constraint | "Cannot use AWS — decided to kill EC2 last month" |
| Pain point | "Deploy failed 3 times because of env var mismatch" |
| Novel knowledge | "The H200 has 141GB VRAM, not 80GB" |
Hard Filter — Never Store
These belong to working memory, not long-term:
- File reads — the file exists, re-read it if needed
- Command outputs — logs are logs, not memories
- Tool failures on retry — the retry succeeded, that's what matters
- Autocomplete attempts — exploration is not commitment
- Questions from the user — the question is transient, the answer is what matters
- Your own internal reasoning — chain-of-thought is scaffolding, not memory
- Praise from the user ("great job", "thanks") — dopamine habituation will kill these anyway
Failure Mode
Over-storing produces signal dilution. When every memory has importance ≈ 0.3, recall becomes random. The Ebbinghaus decay was designed to kill low-importance memories — if you store everything with high importance, decay cannot help you.
A memory system that stores 1000 items per session has 1000 items of garbage. Store 10 items of substance.
The Rule
Before remember(), pause. If you cannot state in one sentence why this will matter in 7 days, do not encode.
