AI agent memory concepts
The whole model — layers, organizers, and who writes what.
Ocean Labs
OceanDB has a small model that compounds. Learn these few pieces and the rest follows.
Three layers
Memory lives in three layers, from raw to refined:
entries— the append-only log. Episodic notes, decisions, and documents your agent captures as it works. Cheap to write, never rewritten in bulk.pages— the consolidated wiki. One page per entity or topic, each fact cited back to the entry it came from. This is what you read first.links— the typed edge graph over entries and pages:mentions,relates,part_of,derived_from,contradicts,merged_into.
A clear boundary
Your agent writes entries — nothing else. Consolidating entries into pages and drawing links between them is the Dreamer’s job. Capture stays cheap and fast; the deeper, structural work happens on its own pass. See The Dreamer.
Two axes of organization
Where a memory can be seen and what a memory is about are different questions, kept apart on purpose:
- A workspace is the sharing boundary — who can see this. Your personal space is a private workspace of one, and the default. Shared spaces are teams you co-own. See Workspaces.
- A project is a topical scope inside a workspace — what a memory is about (Health, Finance, the Acme launch). An entry has one home project; a page can span several.
Alongside projects, tags are the cross-cutting labels — many per memory, emergent, applied as your agent goes. A project is the folder; tags are the labels.
Insights
There’s one more layer, and it flows the other way. Every other layer runs
toward memory; insights runs back from it. When your agent notices
something non-obvious — a pattern, a connection you never stated, a
blind-spot — it writes a short note to its notebook, and you can read it in
the dashboard. See Insights.
Who writes what
| Role | Writes | Reads |
|---|---|---|
| Your agent (capture) | entries, tags, insights | pages first, then entries |
| The Dreamer | pages, links | everything, per workspace |
| You (dashboard) | edits, approvals, archives | everything |
Memory compounds because the cheap path and the careful path stay separate — your agent captures freely, and the Dreamer keeps the whole thing in order.