“File the call notes under project, not the month — third time I’ve had to say this. Once something happens in the memory often enough, I think it’s three to four times, it’s going to promote the memory to a rule, so that it’s not just a transient thing, it becomes an obligatory behavior.” — Lou
Session context: 2026-07-16_Mastermind — Lou walked through what an AAI folder actually does over time, using the example of correcting the same filing mistake repeatedly.
Core Idea
Memory and rules get lumped together and they do different jobs. A memory is a fact the agent may consult. A rule is a behavior the agent must follow. The distinction is consulted-if-relevant versus obligatory — and getting it wrong in either direction hurts.
Promote everything to a rule and you get a bloated, contradictory rule file where genuine constraints drown in one-off preferences. Promote nothing and you spend forever repeating yourself: the agent has the memory, it just never treated it as binding.
The AAI folder settles this with a repetition counter. Every correction gets logged as memory. When the same correction shows up three to four times, it graduates out of memory and into the references file as a rule. Nobody decides. The mechanism decides, and the criterion is evidence.
Why repetition is the right signal: you can’t tell in advance which of your preferences are load-bearing. In the moment, every correction feels important — that’s why you’re making it. But most are situational and will never recur. The ones you find yourself saying a third time have proven, by your own behavior, that they’re standing preferences rather than momentary ones. Repetition is the cheapest available evidence that something is a rule, and it costs nothing to collect because you were going to make the correction anyway.
The same logic runs the vault’s hot-cache→wiki promotion and the memory→rule promotion in AAI: earned permanence. Nothing gets to be permanent by being asserted. It gets there by surviving.
Lou’s related note is that the promotion trigger itself is yours to set. Ten turns, end of conversation, a checkpoint keyword, a hook, a scheduled job — the mechanism is the same, only the clock changes.
Practical Application
Add the promotion rule to your folder’s instructions, verbatim:
Log every correction I make to memory with a count. When the same correction reaches three occurrences, promote it to a rule in
references.mdand note the date and the three instances that earned it.
Then, once a month, read the rules file backwards — newest first — and ask of each: does this still hold? Promotion is automatic; demotion isn’t. A rules file that only ever grows is the same failure as the bloated CLAUDE.md, arrived at slowly.
Coaching question: “What correction have I made to my AI three times this month that still isn’t written down as a rule?”
Related Insights
- Insight - The Self-Improving Skill Loop — Have the Skill Learn From Every Use — the skill-level version of the same loop; this is the folder-level version, with repetition as the explicit promotion gate.
- Insight - Distributed Agent Memory — Scope Memory to the Function, Not the Platform — where memory lives; this is about what happens to it once it’s there.
- Insight - The Markdown Test — If It Can’t Be Written Down, It Belongs to the Harness — memory and rules are both markdown and both travel; the promotion trigger is a harness concern.
- Insight - Ambient Memory — Compounding Intelligence Requires Memory Engineered Across Three Tiers — tiering by recency; this tiers by bindingness, which is a separate axis.
Evolution Across Sessions
Establishes the baseline for memory→rule promotion as a distinct mechanism. The vault has covered promotion by recency and reference count (Insight - The Hot Cache, Wiki, Semantic Memory Stack for AI-First Workflows, hot→wiki graduation) and self-improvement at the skill level (Insight - The Self-Improving Skill Loop — Have the Skill Learn From Every Use), but not promotion by repetition into obligation. Future sessions should test the threshold — three is Lou’s working number, stated with a hedge (“I think it’s three to four”) — and, more importantly, whether anything ever gets demoted.
Source
- 2026-07-16_Mastermind (Lou — AAI memory-to-rule promotion mechanism)