How your node remembers

Imagine your node keeps two books on its desk. The first is a bound notebook: when you say something worth keeping, it writes the fact down and never tears the page out. The second is a running log where it periodically jots a short summary of the session so far, so it can keep the thread without rereading every earlier line. Your node's memory works the same way, split into a durable book and an ephemeral one.

You control the durable book directly. In the Knaix CLI, prefixing a line with /remember(or simply starting with "remember...") tells the node this is a fact to keep, and it appends a timestamped entry. The ephemeral log fills in on its own: as a session grows, a background worker compresses the recent exchange into a short summary and appends it there, which keeps long sessions responsive without you managing it.

Both books are plain Markdown files on the node itself: _knaix_durable_memory.md and _knaix_ephemeral_log.md, kept per node under your home directory at ~/.knaix/memory/. You can open them, read them, and version them like any other file, because that is exactly what they are.

Memory is stored on the node, in your directory, with restrictive permissions (the memory directory is 0700 and each file 0600) so other local users cannot read it. Nothing about "what your agent knows about you" is held in a shared account or a central Kovalent database. When memory is written, the node also indexes that file into its own local vector store, so future questions can retrieve it by meaning, not just by exact wording.

Memory is scoped to a single node: what one node remembers is not automatically known to another, which is the correct default for isolation but means you decide what to record where. Both files are append-only, so it is worth pruning entries that go stale. The durable book holds only the facts you mark with /remember; the ephemeral log is written for you, so its summaries are condensed notes of the session rather than a verbatim transcript, and like the durable file they never leave your deployment.