Membrane

1. Executive Summary

Membrane is a Go memory substrate for LLM agents: six typed record classes — episodic, working, semantic, competence, plan_graph, entity — in one Postgres schema with pgvector, reachable as an embeddable library or as a gRPC daemon with TypeScript, Python and OpenClaw clients. Its retrieval is bounded by rows and bytes both in SQL and above the store, and its code cites a written specification (rfc.md) by section number in hundreds of doc comments. Its weakness is correction: a revision status is written and never filtered on, and the salience of zero that stands in for it is also the prune sweep's deletion trigger.

The typing is real, not a label. MemoryRecord is one shape with a discriminated payload (pkg/schema/memory.go:16-76), and Validate refuses a record whose Payload.PayloadKind() disagrees with its Type (:227-229). Each class has its own lifecycle. Episodic records are immutable by construction — revision.ensureRevisable rejects every revision operation on them (pkg/revision/revision.go:46-54) — and the ingestion policy gives them a one-hour decay half-life. Semantic records are the only class carrying a revision state. The policy gives a captured observation thirty days (pkg/ingestion/policy.go:34-43); the semantic record derived during capture and every consolidator output take the one-day default of schema.NewMemoryRecord (pkg/schema/memory.go:167-174).

The bounding work is the part of this design to read closely. Retrieval is capped twice — by row count and by an aggregate 16 MB projected-byte budget computed in SQL before hydration (pkg/storage/postgres/postgres.go:723-733) — and the service re-applies both caps in Go on the returned slice, because "ListOptions projection fields are an optimization contract, not a trust boundary" (pkg/retrieval/retrieval.go:263-266). Scope and sensitivity are filtered in the same way: a SQL predicate, then a second in-memory check. Derived records inherit the maximum sensitivity of every contributing source, and entity backreferences that a promotion made unsafe are pruned in the same transaction (pkg/storage/derived_policy.go:73-141).

Correction is where the design stops short of its own vocabulary. RevisionStatus is a proper three-state enum — active, contested, retracted — and four code paths write it. No read path filters or ranks on it; it is copied into the gRPC response and nowhere else. Retract and Merge also set Salience = 0 (pkg/revision/revision.go:77-85), and that zero is the only thing retrieval can act on, through a MinSalience the caller supplies and whose default is 0 in both SDKs. The project's own lifecycle eval passes MinSalience: 0.01 and asks for roots only to make the retraction scenario come out right (cmd/membrane-eval-lifecycle/main.go:326-331, :693-703). A positive floor does not reach graph neighbours, so a superseded record can come back one hop from its replacement. Contest does not touch salience at all, so a contested fact is returned exactly as an uncontested one.

Two lifecycle interactions cut the other way and delete more than intended. A record whose salience is zero and whose deletion policy is the default auto_prune is eligible for hard deletion by the decay sweep (pkg/decay/decay.go:319-331), so a retracted record — the one Retract's doc comment says is kept "without deleting it, preserving auditability" — is removed at the next sweep, taking its audit_log rows with it through the FK cascade. And ApplyDecay measures elapsed time from LastReinforcedAt, which the sweep never advances, while multiplying the already decayed salience, so decay compounds quadratically in the number of sweeps.

Where to be sceptical: every claim about retrieval quality rests on an eval that needs a live embedding key, and no result file is committed to the tree. What is committed and unconditional is a large unit suite, a scope/sensitivity negative eval that runs in CI against Postgres, and a checker script with its own committed negative controls.

2. Mental Model

A memory is whatever an agent hands to CaptureMemory. There is no admission gate. The request carries a reason_to_remember string, the only field in the API that names a selectivity decision. It is stored into the episodic environment context (pkg/ingestion/capture.go:539), used as a fallback summary when the request carries none (:546), and put into the ingest LLM prompt (pkg/ingestion/llm.go:46); no branch decides anything on it. Classifier.Classify picks a type from the candidate kind and PolicyEngine.Apply stamps a confidence from the same kind (tool output 0.9, event 0.8, observation 0.7) and a half-life from the type. Everything offered is written.

Selection happens afterwards, in two places. Promotion decides what becomes durable knowledge: SemanticConsolidator only reads episodic records whose Outcome is success (pkg/consolidation/semantic.go:65-67), and CompetenceConsolidator groups successful episodes by the exact ordered signature of their tool names and promotes a group only at minPatternOccurrences = 2 (pkg/consolidation/competence.go:19, :107-110). Attrition decides what stops being retrievable: exponential salience decay per type, a 24-hour episodic compression that halves salience down to a 0.05 floor, and an auto-prune that deletes at the floor.

Epistemic status is a second, parallel axis, and it is the one that does not close. RevisionStatus moves on four writes — Contest sets contested (pkg/revision/contest.go:42), retractRecord sets retracted (pkg/revision/revision.go:83), Supersede and markSemanticActive set active (pkg/revision/supersede.go:73, revision.go:95). A search for every read of that field at the tree root returns those writes, one erasure in normalizeNewRecordMetadata (pkg/revision/audit.go:43), and the copy into the gRPC response (api/grpc/handlers.go:1896-1905). No filter and no ranking term consults it. What a reader sees instead is salience: Retract and Merge set it to zero, Supersede retracts the old record the same way, and Contest leaves it alone.

So a fact dies by falling below whatever min_salience its caller happens to pass, and it dies only as a root. The Python SDK defaults that floor to 0.0 (clients/python/membrane/client.py:819) and the TypeScript SDK to 0 (clients/typescript/src/client.ts:295), both of which return a retracted record. The OpenClaw plugin defaults to 0.3 (clients/openclaw/src/types.ts:47), which keeps one out of the roots. But the plugin expands one hop and injects the neighbours into the prompt (clients/openclaw/src/index.ts:299-335), and neighbour hydration builds its query with no salience floor (pkg/retrieval/graph.go:537-551). A superseded record can therefore return beside the replacement whose supersedes edge points at it.

And the death is not stable in either direction. The episodic-to-semantic consolidator matches a successful episode's events against existing semantic records by scope plus subject/predicate/object, without consulting revision status, and adds a fixed gain of 0.1 for a source it has not seen before (pkg/consolidation/semantic.go:81-85, pkg/consolidation/semantic_reinforcement.go:53-64). A retracted observed_in fact that is observed again rises back above zero and becomes retrievable, still labelled retracted. If the decay sweep gets there first, the record is deleted outright and the identical fact is recreated as new.

%% caption: revision status is written on four paths and filtered on none, so the only thing retrieval can act on is salience — and zero salience is simultaneously the retraction signal, a value a caller must opt into filtering on the roots only, and the condition that makes an auto-prune record eligible for hard deletion with its audit history
flowchart TD
  C["CaptureMemory: no admission gate, reason_to_remember stored not evaluated"] --> A["active record: salience 1.0, deletion_policy auto_prune"]
  A --> K{"consolidation sweep, every 6h"}
  K -->|"episodic Outcome == success"| S["semantic fact created or reinforced"]
  K -->|"same tool signature twice"| P["competence record created"]
  A --> R["Retract or Merge: status = retracted, salience = 0, audit delete entry"]
  A --> V["Supersede: old status = retracted, salience = 0, supersedes edge pair"]
  A --> T["Contest: status = contested, salience untouched"]
  T -->|"nothing filters on the status"| Q["returned exactly like an active record"]
  R --> M{"caller's min_salience > 0?"}
  V --> M
  M -->|"no, the SDK default"| Q
  M -->|"yes"| X["excluded from the roots of this response only"]
  X -.->|"one hop from a returned root, no salience floor"| N["returned as a graph neighbour"]
  R --> D{"decay sweep: salience <= floor and auto_prune and not pinned"}
  D -->|"yes"| H["hard delete; audit_log rows cascade away"]
  S -.->|"same subject/predicate/object observed again, status never checked"| G["salience += 0.1 from the episodic consolidator, retrievable again, still labelled retracted"]
  R -.-> G
  H -.->|"the identical fact is recreated as new"| C

3. Architecture

One process and one database. membrane.New opens a PostgresStore, applies pkg/storage/postgres/schema.sql on startup with the configured embedding dimension substituted into the vector(…) column, and wires ingestion, retrieval, decay, revision, consolidation and metrics against it. membraned adds a gRPC server on 127.0.0.1:9090 by default. Postgres with pgvector is not optional in either shape — the README says so and check-postgres-only.sh enforces it, failing the build on any SQLite, file-backed-store or optional-vector-index reference anywhere in the tree including the docs.

Fifteen tables: memory_records, a key-value embedding_metadata, and thirteen children keyed on memory_records(id) with ON DELETE CASCADE: decay_profiles, payloads, interpretations, tags, provenance_sources, relations (with a UNIQUE(source_id, predicate, target_id)), three entity indexes, audit_log, competence_stats, trigger_embeddings (per-record vectors despite the name, with an ivfflat … vector_cosine_ops index at lists = 100), and episodic_extraction_log. The store is ordinary SQL and inspectable by hand.

Two background tickers, started by Membrane.Start and both full-store scans. Decay defaults to one hour and consolidation to six (pkg/membrane/config.go:121-122); the schedulers' own fallback for a non-positive interval is one minute. ApplyDecayAll calls store.List(ctx, ListOptions{}) with no limit and then issues one transaction per record (pkg/decay/decay.go:281-301); Prune lists everything again. SemanticConsolidator and CompetenceConsolidator each call ListByType over the whole corpus of episodic records and of their own type. Per-sweep cost therefore scales with the size of the store rather than with the day's activity, and the decay sweep issues O(records) transactions each time.

External dependencies are narrow: pgx, protobuf/gRPC, google/uuid, yaml.v3. Embedding and LLM providers are HTTP clients configured by endpoint and key, and everything except vector ranking and LLM extraction works without them — the selector falls back to record.Confidence as its applicability signal and retrieval falls back to salience ordering.

Deployment and ergonomics

Postgres 16 with pgvector (the bundled compose file pins pgvector/pgvector:pg16 and binds to 127.0.0.1 only), plus make build and the daemon binary. No API key is needed to store anything: structured capture, graph retrieval, revision and access control all run with no provider configured. An embedding provider adds automatic vector population and hybrid ranking; an LLM provider adds optional ingest interpretation and triple extraction during consolidation.

The security defaults are unusually careful for a project this size. rejectUnauthenticatedPublicListen refuses to start without an API key on a non-loopback listener, and rejectInsecurePublicCredentials refuses API-key auth over plaintext off loopback unless TLS is configured or allow_insecure_credentials is set (api/grpc/authz.go:206-230). The compose file makes MEMBRANE_POSTGRES_PASSWORD a required variable with :?, so docker compose fails rather than defaulting a password.

4. Essential Implementation Paths

Capture. Membrane.CaptureMemory → ingestion.Service.CaptureMemoryWithAccess (pkg/ingestion/capture.go:150). Sensitivity is resolved from policy before anything else so the primary record and every derived record agree; prepareCaptureResolution (:194) builds a deterministic fallback interpretation, optionally overlays an LLM Interpret call, fetches bounded candidate records, and optionally overlays a second Resolve call against those candidates. Both LLM steps swallow their errors (if err == nil && …) and keep the deterministic interpretation. Then one transaction wraps captureMemory (:236), which creates the primary record, resolves each mention to a canonical entity or creates one, materializes relation and reference candidates as edges, and may create a semantic record with maybeCreateSemanticRecordWithResolutionIndex (:1497). Every stage is budgeted by an explicit constant — mention count, alias count, normalized bytes, match operations — declared in one const block at pkg/ingestion/capture.go:18-75.

Layered retrieval. retrieval.Service.Retrieve (pkg/retrieval/retrieval.go:205) builds one ListOptions carrying the trust context's scopes, IncludeUnscoped when scopes are restricted, a max sensitivity, MinSalience, a candidate limit and the byte budget, and requires the store to implement BoundedListStore — a store that cannot bound is refused rather than scanned (:253-256). Results are sanitized, re-filtered by trust, re-filtered by salience when MinSalience > 0, re-bounded by bytes, then ranked: vector cosine when a ranker and query embedding exist, else selector-promoted, else salience.

Graph expansion. Service.RetrieveGraph (pkg/retrieval/graph.go:47) runs the layered retrieval for roots, adds entity roots resolved from the task descriptor through FindGraphEntitiesByTermBounded, reranks, and walks outgoing and incoming relations breadth-first under root/node/edge/hop limits. Trust is applied at each hop, and the code refuses to expand from a record it is only allowed to see redacted: "would restore content removed by Redact and reveal private neighbors" (:132-134). Neighbours are fetched by exact ID under the trust context's scope and sensitivity and with no MinSalience (:537-551), so the caller's floor applies to roots only.

Revision. pkg/revision is five files, each one transaction. Supersede retracts the old record, links supersedes/superseded_by both ways, appends a revise entry to the old and a create entry to the new. Fork leaves both active and links derived_from/derived_semantic. Merge retracts every source. Retract sets salience to zero and appends a delete entry. Contest sets the status, adds contested_by/contests edges when the reference names a stored record the caller may link to, and appends a revise entry. ensureEvidence refuses a semantic revision with neither payload evidence nor provenance sources (pkg/revision/revision.go:58-73).

Decay and prune. decay.Service.ApplyDecay (pkg/decay/decay.go:26) reads the record, computes elapsed = now - LastReinforcedAt, zeroes salience if MaxAgeSeconds has passed, applies Exponential to the current salience, writes it through UpdateSalience and appends a decay audit entry. Prune (:305) deletes every unpinned auto_prune record whose salience is at or below its floor and under 0.001; deletePruned (:338) appends a delete audit entry and then deletes the record in the same transaction, which cascades that entry away with the rest.

Consolidation. Service.RunAll (pkg/consolidation/consolidation.go:115) runs episodic compression, observation-to-semantic extraction, the optional LLM triple extractor, competence extraction and plan-graph extraction in sequence, aborting the whole run on the first error. The LLM extractor is the only stage with a work queue: episodic_extraction_log marks a record in flight with triple_count = -1 and records the unique triple count on completion.

gRPC. api/grpc/handlers.go validates every field before touching the service — string lengths, a JSON payload byte/depth budget (jsonPayloadBudget), float slices for NaN and infinity, enum membership — then derives a trust context from the server policy rather than from the request, and re-authorizes every referenced record ID through a capped field-only metadata lookup (authorizeReferencedMemories, :877).

Tests. pkg/*/…_test.go run against internal/teststore with no database; tests/ and api/grpc integration cases are gated on MEMBRANE_TEST_POSTGRES_DSN and run in CI with a Postgres service.

5. Memory Data Model

MemoryRecord (pkg/schema/memory.go:16) is the single shape: ID, Type, Sensitivity, Confidence in [0,1], Salience in [0,∞), optional Scope and Tags, CreatedAt/UpdatedAt, a Lifecycle, a Provenance, typed Relations, a discriminated Payload, an optional Interpretation, and an AuditLog. The Postgres schema enforces the enums as CHECK constraints, so an invalid type or sensitivity cannot be written even by a caller bypassing Validate.

Payloads. Semantic is subject/predicate/object with Evidence []ProvenanceRef, a Validity, a RevisionState and a RevisionPolicy string. Competence is skill name, triggers, an ordered recipe with per-step tool and validation, failure modes, fallbacks and PerformanceStats. Plan graph carries nodes, data/control edges and metrics. Entity carries a canonical name, typed aliases and namespaced identifiers, indexed into entity_terms and entity_identifiers with a scope column.

Scoping is a single free-form string per record. It is not a tenancy boundary in the sense of separate databases — one Postgres instance holds every scope — but it is a real predicate on the read path, clamped server-side against read_scopes/write_scopes. Two asymmetries matter. On reads, a record with an empty scope is visible to every trust context (pkg/retrieval/trust.go:110); on writes, allowsWriteRecord refuses an empty scope outright, with the comment saying so: "every network mutation must name an explicitly permitted non-empty scope" (api/grpc/authz.go:118-131). So the in-process library and the daemon's own consolidation can create unscoped records that every caller can then read.

Sensitivity is a five-level ordinal that gates reads with a one-level-above redacted view — metadata retained, payload, provenance, relations and audit log cleared (pkg/retrieval/filter.go:51-88). Derived records raise their sensitivity to the maximum of their sources, never lower it, and the raise is computed against a locked in-transaction reading of the source's classification rather than the snapshot the background pass carried (pkg/storage/derived_policy.go:73-95).

Temporal fields are record time only: created_at and updated_at on the row, last_reinforced_at on the decay profile, and a timestamp per provenance source and per audit entry. Valid time exists in the schema — Validity{Mode, Conditions, Start, End} with a timeboxed mode — and is writable over gRPC through validityFromPB (api/grpc/handlers.go:1845-1861). Every producer inside the tree writes ValidityModeGlobal with no window (pkg/ingestion/ingestion.go:347, pkg/ingestion/capture.go:1528, pkg/consolidation/semantic.go:102, pkg/consolidation/semantic_extractor.go:322). A search for readers of Validity.Start or Validity.End at the tree root finds only the protobuf conversion that echoes them back out, so nothing filters or ranks on validity time.

Correction chains are graph edges plus payload pointers: supersedes/superseded_by as a Relation pair and as RevisionState string fields, derived_from/derived_semantic for forks and merges, contests/contested_by for contests. They are durable and queryable. What is missing is any record keyed on a rejected value — searches for tombstone, denylist, blocklist, blacklist and never_reassert across the tree return nothing — so nothing prevents a retracted subject/predicate/object from being written again.

6. Retrieval Mechanics

Three arms. The first is a SQL candidate list ordered salience DESC, created_at DESC, id under the scope, sensitivity, type, tag and salience predicates. The second is a pgvector cosine ranking over trigger_embeddings when an embedding provider is configured, with SearchByEmbeddingCandidates available so a filtered candidate set does not have to share the global vector window. The third is a lexical entity-term lookup that matches a normalized query term by equality or either-direction substring, ranked exact-before-contains-before-contained (pkg/storage/postgres/postgres.go:1817-1837). Graph expansion then walks typed relations from the ranked roots.

Ranking is a three-way priority in Retrieve (pkg/retrieval/retrieval.go:302-312): vector similarity for all records when a ranker and query embedding exist, with selector-chosen competence and plan_graph records promoted to the front; otherwise selector ranking; otherwise pure salience. The Selector scores competence and plan_graph candidates on three equally weighted signals — applicability (cosine similarity if embeddings exist, else the record's Confidence field as a stand-in), observed success rate from PerformanceStats, and a 30-day-half-life recency of reinforcement. It reports a Confidence that is the normalized gap between the best and second-best candidate, with NeedsMore set below a configurable threshold (pkg/retrieval/selector.go:68-132). Reporting "these two are too close to choose between" as a first-class field is a good idea; it is up to the caller to do anything with it.

Token budgeting is byte budgeting, and it is unusually thorough. MaxBoundedHydrationBytes is 16 MB; the SQL computes each candidate's projected payload and interpretation size with octet_length in a materialized CTE and stops accumulating IDs once the budget is exhausted, before any record is hydrated. The service recomputes projected bytes in Go over the returned slice, and a single record that cannot fit even without relations and history produces a typed ProjectedRecordTooLargeError. Truncation is reported to the caller as a response_byte_limit_applied diagnostic rather than silently.

Retrieval is application-driven. There is no automatic injection in the core; the OpenClaw plugin adds one by calling retrieveGraph on before_agent_start and formatting roots and neighbours into a context string.

Failure modes. The retracted-record leak comes first. MinSalience is the only mechanism that removes retracted and superseded material, its default is zero in both SDKs, and it filters roots and not graph neighbours. A caller who forgets it, or who expands a hop, gets the wrong fact back with its payload; the returned record's revision.status says retracted only to a caller who looks. Beyond that: unscoped records join every result set; a scope-restricted query still admits them by design (IncludeUnscoped is set precisely when scopes are restricted); and the entity-term lookup's substring matching in both directions will pull in an entity whose canonical name merely contains a query token.

7. Write Mechanics

Writes are synchronous and transactional. CaptureMemory does its interpretation work first, then opens one transaction for the primary record, the entity records and every edge, so a partially resolved capture is never visible. Revision operations are one transaction each, with the explicit contract stated in every file header: "partial revisions are never externally visible (RFC 15.7)".

The agent blocks on what it configures. With no provider, capture is a handful of Postgres round-trips. With ingest_llm_enabled, it is up to two LLM calls — Interpret and, when the interpreter also implements CandidateResolver, Resolve against fetched candidates — both on the caller's goroutine before the transaction opens. Both failures degrade to the deterministic fallback interpretation rather than failing the capture, which is the right choice.

Retrievability lag is zero for the record itself — it is committed and visible to the next query — and is bounded by the consolidation interval for anything derived from it: up to six hours by default before a successful episode becomes a semantic fact or a repeated tool signature becomes a competence record. Embeddings are written best-effort after the transaction (s.embedRecord ignores its error), so a new record can be retrievable by salience and scope for a moment before it is rankable by vector.

Two background passes re-read the whole store. Decay lists every record and issues one transaction per record every hour; consolidation lists every episodic record, every semantic record and every competence record every six hours. Neither is incremental except the LLM triple extractor, which has an explicit queue table. Token cost is bounded — only the extractor calls a model — but database cost scales with corpus size rather than with the day's activity.

Deduplication is exact-match, not semantic: findExistingSemanticFact looks up subject/predicate/object within a scope, and consolidation keys its index the same way. Repeat evidence for a known fact appends a provenance source and adds a gain once per distinct source: a fixed 0.1 from the episodic consolidator (pkg/consolidation/semantic.go:84), and from the LLM extractor the destination's own gain, which is zero on every record the tree creates (section 9). A source already recorded is a no-op, which is what stops the six-hourly sweep from driving every fact to salience 1.0 (pkg/consolidation/semantic_reinforcement.go:50-52).

Noisy or hostile input is not filtered. There is no content policy, no injection screen, no rate limit on what a captured tool result may assert; the defences are structural — a per-request JSON byte and depth budget at the gRPC boundary, scope and sensitivity clamps on writes, and the fact that an agent cannot raise its own trust context.

Operational cost

Per turn, the OpenClaw plugin captures on after_agent_reply and after_tool_call and awaits each capture, so a memory write sits on the agent's critical path. Injected context is bounded by context_limit roots (default 5) plus graph neighbours within a one-hop budget, formatted as a text block — prepended, so it does sit where a provider's prompt-prefix cache would be invalidated on every turn whose memory changed.

8. Agent Integration

Four surfaces. The Go library exposes the full Membrane API including the complete-record RetrieveByID. The gRPC service exposes eleven RPCs — CaptureMemory, RetrieveGraph, RetrieveByID, Supersede, Fork, Retract, Merge, Reinforce, Penalize, GetMetrics, Contest — with TypeScript and Python SDKs that validate arguments client-side before transport. The OpenClaw plugin registers three hooks and one model-facing tool, membrane_search. The agent harness (examples/agent-harness) defines five OpenAI function tools: membrane_retrieve_graph, membrane_capture_fact, membrane_capture_working_state, membrane_capture_episode, membrane_retrieve_by_id.

The model gets to write and read, not to correct. No shipped integration exposes Supersede, Retract, Contest, Merge or Fork as a tool — a search for membrane_supersede, membrane_retract and membrane_contest across the clients and examples returns nothing. Revision is an operator or application action reached through the SDK. That is a defensible trust boundary and it should be stated as one, because it means the "agents can revise" framing describes the API rather than any shipped agent loop.

Trust is server-derived, which is the right call. A gRPC caller supplies a TrustContext, and accessPolicy.readTrust intersects it with the server's configured policy: the sensitivity is min(requested, policy) and any requested scope outside read_scopes is a PermissionDenied rather than a silent narrowing (api/grpc/authz.go:93-108, :141-166). An agent cannot widen its own access by asking.

Session lifecycle is the working-memory type: thread_id, task_state from a five-value enum, a context summary, next actions and open questions, with a one-day half-life. There is no compaction-boundary hook; an agent resumes by retrieving its working record.

Porting cost is low for anything that speaks gRPC — the .proto is the contract and the two SDKs are thin — and the OpenClaw plugin's 464-line index.ts is a readable template for a new harness.

9. Reliability, Safety, and Trust

Provenance is required, not optional. Provenance.Sources is populated on every write path, ProvenanceSource carries kind, an opaque ref, an optional content hash, a creator and a timestamp, and ensureEvidence refuses a semantic revision that has neither payload evidence nor provenance sources. normalizeNewRecordMetadata makes the operation's identity, lineage, timestamps and lifecycle authoritative while preserving the caller's attributed evidence — a caller cannot forge who performed a revision or when, only what it claims as evidence.

The uncertainty representation is present and unused. Confidence is a float, used by the selector as an applicability proxy. Status is a discrete state, copied into the response and filtered on by nothing. A second status, the interpretation's tentative/resolved (pkg/schema/interpretation.go:5-10), records whether mention resolution finished and is read by no retrieval path. The distinction the capability rubric draws — a score answers "how sure", a state answers "may this be acted on" — is exactly the one this codebase declares and does not complete: trust_state is withheld for that reason, not for the absence of the idea.

The retraction-then-prune interaction is the sharpest reliability problem. Retract's contract is that the record survives for auditability. But it sets salience to zero without touching DeletionPolicy or Pinned, the ingestion default policy is auto_prune (pkg/ingestion/policy.go:41), the default decay profile's MinSalience floor is zero, and Prune deletes any unpinned auto_prune record at or below its floor and under 0.001. Zero satisfies both. deletePruned then writes an auto-pruned: salience reached floor audit entry and deletes the record inside the same transaction, so the FK cascade removes the entry it just wrote along with the record's entire history. The same applies to every record Supersede and Merge retract: the superseded original is deleted, and the supersedes relation on the survivor cascades with it.

The decay sweep compounds. ApplyDecay computes elapsed from LastReinforcedAt and never advances it; after creation only the reinforcement paths — Reinforce, ReinforceFromSource and the consolidators' reinforceSemanticFact — set it. It applies salience * 2^(-elapsed/halfLife) to the current stored salience. After n sweeps at interval Δ the stored value is S₀ · 2^(−Δ·n(n+1)/(2H)) rather than S₀ · 2^(−nΔ/H). At the shipped defaults — a one-hour interval and a one-hour episodic half-life — an episodic record's salience after four sweeps is 0.00098 instead of the intended 0.0625, and after six it is 4.8e-07 instead of 0.0156. A thirty-day semantic half-life is 720 times the episodic one and reaches the same place later, but the shape is the same. No test applies ApplyDecay twice to the same record, which is why the suite does not see it.

Reinforcement restores no salience by default. The ingestion policy and schema.NewMemoryRecord both leave ReinforcementGain at Go's zero value (pkg/ingestion/policy.go:189-199, pkg/schema/memory.go:167-174), and the insert writes that zero past the column's DEFAULT 0.1 (pkg/storage/postgres/postgres.go:175-181, schema.sql:20). A revision's new record inherits the original's lifecycle (pkg/revision/audit.go:29). So Reinforce resets the decay clock and leaves salience where it was, which the project's integration test states as the intent: "With gain=0, salience stays the same but LastReinforcedAt is updated, which is the primary effect" (tests/integration_test.go:215-217). The one in-tree path that raises salience is the episodic consolidator's fixed 0.1.

Concurrency is handled carefully where it was thought about. GetDerivedDestination reloads a record after locking its authorization metadata in the transaction, "so a background snapshot never overwrites newer payload, evidence or labels", and reinforceSemanticFact re-derives the fact key inside the transaction and aborts with semantic destination fact changed if the destination moved. ContestWithAccess deliberately gives a denied contesting reference the same external behaviour as a missing one, "preventing an authorization oracle while protecting the hidden record's graph".

Injected false memories are bounded by scope and sensitivity, not by content: a compromised tool result becomes an episodic record like any other, and if its outcome is success it becomes a semantic fact at the next consolidation with provenance pointing back at the tool. The provenance is the remedy — you can see where a fact came from — and there is no gate that would have stopped it.

Backup, sync and replication are Postgres's problem; the project ships nothing of its own and does not pretend to.

10. Tests, Evals, and Benchmarks

678 test functions, split between unconditional unit tests against internal/teststore and a tests/ directory plus api/grpc integration cases gated on MEMBRANE_TEST_POSTGRES_DSN (tests/integration_test.go:21-24). A skip is not a pass, so the gate matters — and CI supplies the DSN and a Postgres service, running the gated packages explicitly (.github/workflows/ci.yml:186-191). Coverage is unusually broad on the security-adjacent surfaces: value_payload_security_test.go, bounded_id_auth_test.go, referenced_auth_test.go, graph_redaction_security_test.go, graph_diagnostics_security_test.go.

TestEvalTrustGating is a real negative eval. Three semantic records under two scopes and two sensitivities, one retrieval, and three assertions on the same populated result: the in-scope low record must be present, the high-sensitivity record must be absent, the other-scope record must be absent (tests/eval_trust_test.go:63-71). The positive control is what makes the two exclusions non-vacuous, and both fail if their predicate is removed.

Two of the project's own checks carry negative controls, which is the thing that makes a checker's green result mean something. scripts/check-postgres-only_test.sh copies the checker into a mktemp directory, writes nine distinct violating fixtures — a storage/sqlite import, two SQLite drivers, a .sqlite file reference, an optional vector index doc line, a stale RFC fragment — and fails if the checker exits zero on any of them, then re-runs each with PATH=/usr/bin:/bin to exercise the find/grep fallback when rg is absent. check-go-proto-sync.sh has a matching self-test. And tests/compose_security_test.go:29-31 explicitly shadows MEMBRANE_POSTGRES_PASSWORD rather than merely unsetting it, with a comment naming the failure it is avoiding: "Merely removing the process variable lets Compose load a local .env value and turns this negative test into a machine-dependent false pass." That is the right instinct, written down.

The revision eval asserts a retraction exclusion that cannot fail on an empty result. TestEvalRevisionLifecycle retracts a fact and asserts it is absent from a retrieval with MinSalience: 0.01 (tests/eval_revision_test.go:95-105). The helper keeps roots only (tests/api_helpers_test.go:173-191), so neighbours are never examined, and nothing in that retrieval is asserted present, so the case passes against a retriever that returns nothing. Beside it, TestEvalDecayPrune asserts that an unpinned auto_prune record at salience zero is deleted (tests/eval_decay_test.go:72-106). Pruning at zero is tested behaviour, and the collision with Retract is between two intended rules.

The retrieval eval is real code with no committed result. tests/data/recall_dataset.jsonl holds 59 records across five types and 25 queries, each with an expected ID list, a k, a trust context and memory types; cmd/membrane-eval runs them and reports recall@k, precision@k, MRR and NDCG against a pure-vector baseline. Every query is a positive expectation — the dataset's key union is expected, k, key, memory_types, text, trust, type, with no forbidden or must-not-return field — so the dataset measures ranking quality, not exclusion.

The lifecycle eval's retraction scenario passes a threshold the SDKs do not. cmd/membrane-eval-lifecycle runs four Membrane-versus-RAG scenarios and prints win/tie/loss counts. Scenario 1 retracts a wrong fact and retrieves roots only with MinSalience: 0.01, with the comment "Membrane: respects retraction (salience=0, filtered with MinSalience)" (main.go:326-331, :693-703). That is an accurate description of the mechanism and also the reason the result does not generalize to a caller using the SDK default of zero, or to one that expands the graph. The eval needs both Postgres and a live embedding key, and .github/workflows/eval.yml skips the whole job when the secret is absent.

No eval result reaches the repository. The workflow tees its output to eval-retrieval.txt and eval-lifecycle.txt, uploads them as artifacts, and then runs an awk script that would splice a results table into the README — anchored on a line matching ^### Latest Results (.github/workflows/eval.yml:198). A search for that string across the tree at this commit finds it only inside the workflow itself. With no anchor, awk reproduces the README unchanged and the commit step's git diff --cached --quiet finds nothing to push, so the published numbers land nowhere. Neither result file is committed, and no benchmark was rerun for this report.

No paper. Searches for arxiv, bibtex, @article, @misc, citation, doi.org and a CITATION* file across the tree return nothing. The design document is rfc.md, 680 lines, self-authored, and it is load-bearing: the Go source cites it by section in hundreds of comments, which makes the spec checkable against the code. It is not external validation, and the code diverges from it — the RFC's memory model is implemented closely, but "all memory access must be auditable" is satisfied by a table that the prune path deletes.

What is missing before trusting this. A test that applies decay twice. A test that retrieves after Retract with the default min_salience. A test that expands the graph around a superseded record under a positive min_salience. A test that runs a consolidation sweep after a retraction and asserts the fact stays retracted. A test that asserts audit history survives whatever lifecycle a record actually goes through.

11. For Your Own Build

Steal

Make the projection budget a storage contract, and re-enforce it above the store. Membrane's ListOptions carries Limit, MaxHydratedBytes, OmitRelations and OmitHistory; the Postgres implementation computes projected sizes with octet_length in SQL and stops before hydrating, and the service treats all of it as advisory — "an optimization contract, not a trust boundary" — and re-caps the returned slice in Go. A retrieval layer that cannot be made to allocate unboundedly by a custom store or a large payload is worth the duplication.

Monotone sensitivity for derived records, computed under lock. When a background pass derives a fact from several sources, raise the derived record's classification to the maximum of the sources', re-read each source's authoritative label inside the transaction rather than trusting the snapshot the pass carried, and prune backreferences the promotion made unsafe. pkg/storage/derived_policy.go is 158 lines; read it whole.

Give your own checker scripts negative controls. A checker that has silently stopped working looks exactly like a clean tree. check-postgres-only_test.sh feeds its checker nine violations it must reject, in a scratch directory, including through the no-ripgrep fallback path. Ten minutes of work, and it converts "the check passed" from a hope into evidence.

Report selection ambiguity as a field. The selector returns the normalized gap between the best and second-best candidate as Confidence and sets NeedsMore when it is small. "I have two equally good procedures for this" is information the agent can act on and a bare ranked list throws away.

Cite the spec from the code. // RFC 15A.3: Required field with minimum value of 1 beside the field it describes makes a written design checkable by grep in both directions.

Avoid

Do not encode a memory's epistemic status in a field and then enforce it with a number. If a record can be retracted, some read path must filter on retracted — not on a salience of zero that happens to be set at the same time, and certainly not on a threshold the caller must remember to pass, whose SDK default admits the retracted record. The state and the enforcement have to be the same mechanism, applied on every path that hydrates a record — a floor on the root query that neighbour hydration skips leaks through the graph — or the state is documentation.

Do not overload one value with a status meaning and a lifecycle meaning. Salience zero here means both "this was retracted" and "this is garbage, delete it". Those want opposite treatment, and the second wins: the retraction marker is what makes the record eligible for hard deletion, and the audit history goes with it. If you use a numeric floor to drive pruning, make retraction set something else, or set Pinned when you retract.

Do not write an audit row inside the transaction that deletes its own foreign key. deletePruned appends auto-pruned: salience reached floor and then deletes the record; ON DELETE CASCADE removes the entry before anyone could read it. An audit of deletions belongs in a table that does not reference the deleted row.

Do not compute decay from the last reinforcement while applying it to the last computed value. Either recompute from an immutable baseline, or advance the timestamp you measure from. Membrane does neither, and the quadratic compounding is invisible to a suite that only ever decays each record once.

Do not let an unscoped record be a wildcard on reads. An empty scope readable from every context is a reasonable default only if nothing can create one by accident; here the write boundary forbids it and the in-process library and the consolidators do not.

Fit

This suits a team that already runs Postgres, writes Go, and wants a typed memory model with a written specification rather than a bag of embedded strings — and that is prepared to own the lifecycle semantics itself. The engineering on bounding, authorization and transaction discipline is serious work — every retrieval path has a row cap and a byte cap, every mutation path re-reads its authorization under lock — and the six-type model is a genuine design position rather than a schema with an enum column.

It does not suit anyone who needs correction to be reliable out of the box. The fixes are small — a status predicate on the root query and on neighbour hydration, a Pinned or a deletion-policy change in Retract, one line in ApplyDecay. Until they land, a deployment that retracts facts is one decay sweep away from losing the record and its history, and a client that forgets min_salience, or expands a hop, gets the retracted fact back. It also does not suit an operator who wants a single binary with an embedded store: Postgres with pgvector is mandatory in every shape, deliberately and enforced by a build check. And it does not yet suit an agent that is meant to correct its own memory, because no shipped integration puts revision in the model's hands.

12. Open Questions

• Is the compounding decay intentional — an unstated "decay accelerates for records never reinforced" design — or an oversight? Nothing in rfc.md or the comments suggests the former, and DecayProfile's doc says profiles "MUST be monotonic and reversible via reinforcement"; with a zero gain, reinforcement reverses only the clock, and the compounding form makes the half_life_seconds parameter mean something other than its name.
• What is the intended lifetime of a retracted record? Reading Retract's comment and Prune's condition together gives "forever" and "until the next sweep"; only the author can say which was meant.
• Should graph expansion honour min_salience? getGraphRecord builds its query without it, which may be deliberate — context around a live fact — or an omission; the lifecycle eval and the revision eval both ask for roots only.
• Was Contest meant to affect retrieval at all? It writes a status nothing filters on and leaves salience untouched, so at this commit contesting a record changes only its graph edges and its audit trail.
• Does any deployment set previous_state_json? Both insert sites pass nil; the column may be reserved for a planned before-image, or may be vestigial.
• Has the eval workflow's README table ever been written? The ### Latest Results anchor is absent from the tree, which would make every run since the anchor disappeared a no-op — but the git history, not the checkout, would settle when and why.
• How does consolidation behave over a corpus large enough that ListByType over all episodic records stops fitting comfortably in memory? The retrieval path is byte-bounded with great care; the background path is not bounded at all.

Appendix: File Index

Schema and storage. pkg/schema/memory.go (the record), pkg/schema/enums.go (every closed vocabulary), pkg/schema/payloads.go (the six payload types, Validity, RevisionState), pkg/schema/lifecycle.go, pkg/schema/provenance.go, pkg/schema/audit.go, pkg/schema/relation.go, pkg/storage/store.go (the Store and bounded-lookup interfaces), pkg/storage/postgres/schema.sql, pkg/storage/postgres/postgres.go, pkg/storage/derived_policy.go, pkg/storage/projection.go.

Write path. pkg/ingestion/capture.go, pkg/ingestion/ingestion.go, pkg/ingestion/classifier.go, pkg/ingestion/policy.go, pkg/ingestion/llm.go, pkg/ingestion/source_kind.go.

Retrieval. pkg/retrieval/retrieval.go, pkg/retrieval/graph.go, pkg/retrieval/trust.go, pkg/retrieval/filter.go, pkg/retrieval/selector.go, pkg/embedding/service.go.

Revision and lifecycle. pkg/revision/{revision,supersede,fork,merge,retract,contest,audit}.go, pkg/decay/{decay,curves,scheduler}.go, pkg/consolidation/{consolidation,episodic,semantic,semantic_extractor,semantic_reinforcement,competence,plangraph,entity_links,scheduler}.go.

API and clients. api/proto/membrane/v1/membrane.proto, api/grpc/{server,handlers,authz}.go, pkg/membrane/{membrane,config}.go, cmd/membraned/main.go, clients/typescript/src/client.ts, clients/python/membrane/client.py, clients/openclaw/src/index.ts, clients/openclaw/openclaw.plugin.json, examples/agent-harness/src/tools.ts.

Tests, evals and checks. tests/eval_trust_test.go, tests/recall_test.go, tests/integration_test.go, tests/compose_security_test.go, tests/data/recall_dataset.jsonl, pkg/revision/revision_test.go, pkg/decay/decay_test.go, cmd/membrane-eval/main.go, cmd/membrane-eval-lifecycle/main.go, scripts/check-postgres-only.sh, scripts/check-postgres-only_test.sh, .github/workflows/ci.yml, .github/workflows/eval.yml, Makefile, rfc.md.

Recorded searches. Every absence claim above rests on one of these, run from the tree root at the pinned commit:

• grep -rn 'RevisionStatus\(Active\|Contested\|Retracted\)' --include='*.go' . and grep -rn -i 'revision\.Status' --include='*.go' . | grep -v _test | grep -v pb.go — four writes, one erasure, the two protobuf conversions in api/grpc/handlers.go, no read that filters or ranks.
• grep -n 'MinSalience' pkg/retrieval/graph.go — the request field and its pass-through to the root retrieval; getGraphRecord sets none, so listRecordsBounded emits no salience >= predicate for a neighbour (pkg/storage/postgres/postgres.go:701-703).
• grep -rn 'ReinforcementGain\s*[:=]' --include='*.go' . | grep -v _test — only the protobuf conversions and the store's own read; no write path sets a gain.
• grep -rn 'InterpretationStatus' --include='*.go' . | grep -v _test | grep -v pb.go — written at capture, read by the override merge and the protobuf conversion.
• grep -rn 'Validity\b\|\.Validity' --include='*.go' . | grep -v _test — four producers, all ValidityModeGlobal; the only reads are the protobuf conversions in api/grpc/handlers.go.
• grep -rn -i 'tombstone\|denylist\|blocklist\|blacklist\|never_reassert' --include='*.go' --include='*.sql' --include='*.proto' --include='*.ts' --include='*.py' --include='*.md' . — no match for any of them; a separate grep -rn -i '\brejected\b' over the same file types matches only argument-validation prose, test messages and test fixtures, none naming a stored rejected value.
• grep -rni 'human.review\|approve\|approval\|reviewer' --include='*.go' . | grep -v _test — two matches: a transaction-policy comment at pkg/consolidation/entity_links.go:76, and pkg/consolidation/consolidation.go:4, which states consolidation "requires no user approval".
• grep -rn 'previous_state_json\|PreviousState' --include='*.go' --include='*.sql' . — the column, and two inserts that pass nil.
• grep -rn 'ReasonToRemember\|reason_to_remember' --include='*.go' . | grep -v _test — stored, prompted and used as a fallback summary; no decision reads it.
• grep -rn 'Latest Results' . --include='*.md' --include='*.mdx' --include='*.yml' — one match, inside .github/workflows/eval.yml itself.
• grep -rniE 'arxiv|bibtex|@article|@misc|citation|doi\.org' --include='*.md' --include='*.mdx' --include='*.cff' --include='*.yaml' --include='*.yml' . and find . -iname 'CITATION*' — both empty.
• grep -rn 'membrane_supersede\|membrane_retract\|membrane_contest' clients examples — empty; no shipped integration exposes revision as a model-facing tool.
• python3 -c "…" over tests/data/recall_dataset.jsonl — 25 query objects, key union expected, k, key, memory_types, text, trust, type, no must-not-retrieve field.

History

2026-09-26 — b3f1f091… — an audit at an unchanged pin: master has not moved. Screened again from a full clone: no auto-run surface, two build-time execution paths, nine unpinned surfaces, nothing inside the cooldown. Nothing installed, built or run. No mark moved. A positive min_salience filters roots only, because neighbour hydration applies no floor, so the OpenClaw plugin's 0.3 does not keep a superseded record out of its injected context (section 2). Revision status is copied into the gRPC response. The reinforcement gain is zero on every record the tree creates, so only the episodic consolidator's fixed 0.1 revives a retracted fact (section 9). The semantic half-life is 720 times the episodic one, not 1,000; the table count and the OpenClaw line count are corrected. TestEvalRevisionLifecycle and TestEvalDecayPrune added to section 10.

2026-09-12 — b3f1f091… — first reading. The pinned commit is dated 4 September 2026. Screened before reading: 0 auto-run surfaces, 13 dependency surfaces inside the seven-day cooldown (go.mod, go.sum, four package.json, three lockfiles, clients/python/pyproject.toml, the .deepsec workspace), 9 unpinned surfaces, 2 build-time exec surfaces (Makefile, a prepublishOnly script); nothing was installed, built or executed, and the decay trajectory in section 9 was recomputed from the committed constants in a scratch script rather than by running the project. scope_enforced, audit_log and negative_eval awarded; trust_state, tombstone, bitemporal and human_review withheld for the reasons given in section 9 and section 5.