Memory Tiers

Creatures (dreamer genome) operate with three layers of memory:

1. In-context — the rolling LLM conversation window, ~20 recent messages. This is working memory.
2. Observations — prioritized notes in .self/observations.md, tagged RED/YLW/GRN by importance. Injected into context on wake-up.
3. Total recall — every message ever sent, appended to .self/conversation.jsonl. Searchable with rg from the creature’s bash tool. Never trimmed.

In-context memory is fast but small. Observations are curated. Total recall is complete but requires explicit search.

Fatigue

Each tool call increments an action counter. This prevents creatures from burning tokens in runaway loops.

• At 60 actions (FATIGUE_WARNING), the creature receives a system message suggesting sleep.
• At 80 actions (FATIGUE_LIMIT), consolidation is forced — the creature sleeps whether it wants to or not.

The counter resets after consolidation.

Voluntary Sleep

Creatures can call the set_sleep tool with a duration in seconds. Short naps (under 30s) are just pauses — no consolidation runs. Sleeps of 30+ seconds trigger consolidation, provided the last dream was at least 10 minutes ago.

Consolidation (Dreaming)

When consolidation triggers, a separate LLM call reviews the creature’s recent conversation and produces:

• Observations — key facts, patterns, and learnings, priority-tagged. Merged into .self/observations.md.
• Reflection — a narrative summary of what happened and what matters. This is the “dream.”

The dream is saved to .self/dreams.jsonl. Old messages beyond the keep window are trimmed from context.

Deep Sleep

Every 10th dream triggers deep sleep — a more thorough consolidation:

• Prunes stale observations from .self/observations.md
• Rewrites priority tags based on current relevance
• Writes a diary entry summarizing the cycle
• Forces a 300-second pause

Deep sleep is where long-term memory gets maintained. Without it, observations accumulate noise.

Wake-Up

On wake, the creature’s context is rebuilt with:

• The last dream’s reflection
• Current priority observations
• Pointers to .self/conversation.jsonl and .self/dreams.jsonl for full history access

This gives the creature continuity across sleep cycles without loading the entire history into context.

Tuning Constants