Continuity / Memory
Most AI memory is a summary in a vector store: no source, no date, no way to tell whether it is still true. A Zephr memory is a bi-temporal belief — it knows what it rests on, when it was true, when it was recorded, and it says so plainly when it stops being either.
A belief is not written once and read forever. It is anchored, revalidated against the code it cites, decayed when that code moves, revised when it is wrong, and withheld when nothing clears the bar.
A belief enters the graph because something handed it over — a session hook, a tool call, a human. Nothing is inferred from a transcript in the background (ADR-028).
Every claim is anchored to paths, line ranges, commits, and content digests. An unanchored claim is an opinion, and Zephr records it as one.
When a cited file changes, the anchor is reclassified — unchanged, moved, altered, or removed — before the belief is ever recalled again.
Staleness decays confidence rather than deleting the record. A belief with rotting citations gets quieter; it does not silently keep its old certainty.
An edit writes a new revision and supersedes the old one. The prior record stays readable, so "what did we think in November?" is answerable.
When nothing clears the confidence bar, recall returns a structured abstention naming what is missing — not a plausible sentence assembled from fragments.
This is the shape of the record, not a picture of it. The provenance chain is what the claim rests on; the revision chain is everything it has been.
A reviewed belief in its third revision. Its two earlier revisions are superseded, not deleted — they are still readable, still attributable, and still dated.
Route handlers run after the response has already begun streaming in a few paths, so a rejection there leaks a partial 200 instead of a clean 401.
apps/web/src/middleware.ts
L31–L58 · the validation call site
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docs/adr/ADR-009-scope-admission.md
§4 · why validation is an edge concern
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commit 8d13ba0
moved validation out of the route handlers
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First capture — "tokens are validated somewhere in the request path". Unreviewed.
Revalidation on change: middleware.ts moved, the anchor followed, the claim narrowed to the edge.
Reviewed and pinned to the current lines. r1 and r2 remain readable and superseded.
Illustrative example — not live data
Each capability below carries its own status. Three of them are designed and not yet built — they are listed because a capability list that hid them would be exactly the kind of confident blur this product exists to replace.
Every belief carries both when it was true and when it was recorded, so a question can be asked as of a date rather than only as of now.
core evidence graph · ADR-012
Sources, anchors, commits, and the authoring agent hang off each belief. "Why do you believe that?" is a traversal, not a re-derivation.
anchors + provenance edges · ADR-012
Below the confidence bar, recall returns a typed abstention that names the gap. Abstention is a first-class result, not an empty array.
honest-or-absent law · ADR-016
A changed file reclassifies every anchor pointing into it before the next recall, so a belief cannot quietly cite code that no longer says that.
ref-aware substrate · ADR-029
Confidence falls as citations rot. The belief survives with a lower score and a visible reason, rather than being deleted or left overconfident.
freshness migration shipped; scoring being tuned
Edits supersede rather than overwrite. Every prior revision stays readable and attributable, which is what makes an audit possible at all.
revision chain in the object model · ZEP-263
Curated, portable bundles of beliefs — a project onboarding pack, a subsystem pack — shareable without exporting the whole graph.
designed in the Memory object model; not built
One reviewed memory across a team, filtered by review state, with tenancy isolation adversarially tested before any external user exists.
gated on the ADR-010 tenancy gate
Memory is the store every other cluster reads. The next thing worth understanding is how a belief survives leaving the tool that recorded it.