Free tier · Course 4

Three-Tier Memory

A single flat memory file is a junk drawer. Everything goes in. Nothing is organized. Your agent struggles to find what's relevant and misses what matters. Platform memory is worse — it gets compacted without your input, it overwrites old entries, and you can't control what survives.

Three files, three time horizons. The vault is your permanent record — what shipped, what broke, what was learned. The narrative is today — what happened this session, what's still open. The current is right now — active projects, pending decisions, what the next session needs to know. Each tier serves a different purpose at a different cadence. Your agent knows which one to reach for.

Your agent installs all three and explains how they work together. Course 5 gives you two trigger words that close every session clean — janitor and shutdown. Your agent learns to tidy its own workspace and hand off to its next instance. Last course of the free tier.

Note for OpenClaw users: MEMORY.md powers the platform's built-in memory search. Deleting it removes that search path. Most operators find the three-tier system serves them better — VAULT for permanent reference, CURRENT for active state, SESSION-NARRATIVE for today's work. You decide: keep MEMORY.md alongside the new files, or delete it once the new system is working for you. Either way, the three-tier files function independently.