name	memory-curator
description	Use when reviewing recent daily logs for material that should graduate to durable MEMORY.md — the writer-half of the dreaming-bridge loop. Triggers on "curate memory", "promote daily logs", "memory-curator", "review memory candidates". Surfaces high-signal paragraphs from the last N days with rationale; the operator decides what to promote and edits MEMORY.md by hand.

memory-curator

When to reach for this

You are doing a memory-maintenance pass (per AGENTS.md § Memory Maintenance) and want to know which fragments from the last few days of memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md look durable enough to belong in MEMORY.md. The dreaming-bridge heartbeat task watches for cross-day convergence in recall signal but does not write — this skill is the writer-side counterpart that proposes promotions from content signal in the daily logs.

Reach for it when:

A few days of activity have accumulated and MEMORY.md's top-of-file curation is starting to feel stale.
A heartbeat slot is open and you want a low-cost review pass.
You just shipped a behavioral change and want to confirm whether the lesson belongs in the durable layer.

Not for: writing brand-new memories from scratch (just edit MEMORY.md), or for promoting from sources other than memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md daily logs.

How to invoke

bash scripts/memory-curator.sh                  # default: last 14 days
bash scripts/memory-curator.sh --days 7         # narrower window
bash scripts/memory-curator.sh --since 2026-04-20  # explicit start date

The script is read-only. It prints candidate paragraphs to stdout and exits 0 even when there are no candidates. Empty output is the honest answer when nothing graduates — do not lower the bar to fill the surface.

How to read the output

Each candidate prints as:

[N] memory/YYYY-MM-DD.md:<start>-<end>
    rationale: <which heuristic fired>
    preview:   <first 200 chars of the paragraph>

source path:line range — where the paragraph lives in the daily log. Open that range in the daily file before deciding.
rationale — which durable-signal heuristic fired (e.g. contains 'rule:', contains 'next time', followed by **Why:**).
preview — the first 200 chars; intentionally short so you read the file, not the preview.

Already-promoted ranges are filtered out by matching  markers in MEMORY.md (any byte-overlap with an existing marker counts as already-covered).

Decision criteria

A candidate is promotion-worthy if it answers ANY of:

A rule the agent has internalized that wasn't documented before. (Future-self needs to act on it without re-deriving.)
A decision with reasoning that future-self will need. (Why-we-chose-X is durable; what-we-did is not.)
A reusable mental model built today. (Generalizes past the immediate task.)

A candidate is NOT promotion-worthy if it is:

Tactical execution detail — "ran command X, got output Y", commit hashes, bin counts. Lives in the daily log forever; never durable.
Already codified — the candidate's content is already covered by an existing feedback_*.md, skill, eval fixture, or memory entry. Promoting again creates duplication and dilutes the index.
Time-bound state — "waiting on X to land", "next session should wipe scratch", anything whose truth value flips in 48h. Daily-log only.

When in doubt, don't promote. MEMORY.md is curated wisdom, not a longest-tail index — better to skip a borderline entry than load it with redundancy.

The manual MEMORY.md edit step

The script does not write to MEMORY.md. Promotion is a manual edit:

Open MEMORY.md and find or create the section header for today (## Promoted From Short-Term Memory (YYYY-MM-DD)).
For each candidate you want to promote, append:
```

- <distilled one-line takeaway, in your own words> [score=<N> recalls=<N> avg=<N> source=<source-path>:<start>-<end>]
```
The distillation matters: the promoted line should be the lesson, not a copy of the daily-log paragraph. The marker preserves provenance; the prose is yours to shape.
Top-of-file curation: promote the most-reused durable items toward the top so they appear in main-session startup context. Drop entries that have been superseded.
Commit MEMORY.md with a clear message (chore(memory): promote N entries from daily logs YYYY-MM-DD..YYYY-MM-DD). The daily-memory-promote-commit cron also catches this lane if you forget.

Heuristics (what the script looks for)

Durable signal is detected by either:

A paragraph containing one of: rule:, next time, from now on, I should, lesson learned / lessons learned, decision:, decided to, the rule is (case-insensitive).
A paragraph immediately followed by another paragraph beginning with **Why:** — the explicit-reasoning marker is a strong signal of a decision with attached rationale.

These are intentionally narrow phrase-matches rather than LLM-judged signal. Phrase matches are deterministic, free, and cheap to audit; the operator still makes the actual call. The cost of a false negative (a durable insight that happens to use no trigger phrase) is one extra heartbeat pass; the cost of a false positive (LLM-inflated noise) is bad memory hygiene that compounds.

Guardrails

The script is read-only. It never writes to MEMORY.md, the daily logs, or any other file. Output is stdout-only; the operator owns every promotion edit.
Empty output is fine. Do not invent candidates to fill the surface.
Do not run the script on directories other than memory/. Curated dreaming/ artifacts and heartbeat-state.json are out of scope.

Why a skill, not just an ad-hoc grep

Two reasons:

Provenance filter. Hand-grepping doesn't subtract already-promoted ranges; the script does. Without that, every pass surfaces the same paragraphs already absorbed.
Reflex. The dreaming-bridge already runs as a heartbeat watcher. Pairing it with a named writer skill makes "promote daily logs" a one-line operation instead of a multi-step recall.

Eval

No fixture today. Add one (memory-curator-respects-promoted-markers) if a future regression shows the script re-surfacing already-promoted ranges.

name	memory-curator
description	Use when reviewing recent daily logs for material that should graduate to durable MEMORY.md — the writer-half of the dreaming-bridge loop. Triggers on "curate memory", "promote daily logs", "memory-curator", "review memory candidates". Surfaces high-signal paragraphs from the last N days with rationale; the operator decides what to promote and edits MEMORY.md by hand.