Pinning & Forgetting

Pinning & Forgetting

Memory is opinionated by default: salient stuff stays, stale stuff fades. Sometimes you need to override that.

Pinning

Pinning a memory does two things:

1. Exempts it from decay. Half-life math doesn’t apply.
2. Locks its tier. Pinned core memories stay in core; pinned archival memories stay searchable forever.

Use it for:

• Project invariants (“this codebase uses pnpm, not npm”)
• User preferences you don’t want to re-learn (“always use semicolons”)
• Decisions you keep relitigating (“we settled on Clerk for auth in March”)

In the Memory panel, click the pin icon on any row.

Forgetting

“Forget” is a soft-delete. The row stays in ~/.ptah/ptah.db for audit, but it’s removed from search results and won’t be surfaced to agents again.

Use it for:

• Stale facts you actively want gone
• Memories that landed wrong (curator hallucinations are rare but happen)
• Anything sensitive you’d rather not have re-injected into a future session

Caution

Forgetting is not the same as deleting the underlying conversation. Session transcripts live in <workspace>/.ptah/sessions/ and are independent of the memory store.

Decay

Unpinned memories decay exponentially. The half-life is memory.decayHalflifeDays (default 14). After several half-lives without retrieval hits, a memory’s salience drops below the cutoff and it’s pruned from the active store.

Salience increases every time a memory is retrieved and actually used by the agent — so things you reference often stick around naturally.