Memory

aide manages memory at two layers: per-agent session memory (Claude Code native) and centralized HQ memory (aide's SSOT).

Two layers

Session memory

Claude Code's built-in memory. Each agent session has its own working memory that persists across compactions within that session. aide adds auto-compaction:

[memory]
compact_after = "200k"

When estimated tokens in memory/ exceed the threshold, aide triggers a compaction pass.

HQ memory (centralized SSOT)

After each aide dispatch completes, the agent's output is automatically distilled into HQ memory:

<team>-hq/
├── memory/
│   ├── _shared/              # team-level context (arch decisions, conventions)
│   ├── crossmem-rs/
│   │   └── context.md        # auto-distilled from dispatch outputs
│   └── crossmem-web/
│       └── context.md

The distillation process:

1. Read existing memory/<agent>/context.md (old memory)
2. Read memory/_shared/ (team context, read-only)
3. LLM merges old + new summary — not append, but intelligent merge with dedup
4. Write updated context.md
5. Git commit: memory: sync <agent> @ <timestamp>

This means:

• One source of truth — no conflicting memories across agents
• Git-tracked — full version history, git log memory/<agent>/ shows evolution
• Rollback — git revert if a distillation goes wrong
• Multi-machine sync — push/pull the HQ repo

Configuration

Set the HQ directory in ~/.aide/config.toml:

hq = "/path/to/team-hq"

aide init sets this automatically when creating an HQ.

Manual sync

Backfill or manually trigger memory distillation:

# From a summary string
aide memory-sync crossmem-rs --summary "STATUS: success ..."

# From stdin (pipe from a file, etc.)
cat output.txt | aide memory-sync crossmem-rs

Tips

• Set compact_after slightly below your typical task budget to avoid compaction eating into task tokens
• Use the commit-memory hook to track per-agent memory in git
• HQ memory is injected into future dispatches automatically — keep it concise
• _shared/ is for team-level context (architecture, conventions) that all agents should know