Rung 5 — Design Your Memory Layer

The win: you leave with a memory layer designed for one real workflow — decided on paper, filed in your agent, working by next week.

The four-question framework

Pick one recurring workflow you already run — weekly review, client intake, content pipeline, whatever you touch every week. Now answer four questions:

1. What should the journal handle? The in-flight stuff — what happened this session, where you left off. Answer: nothing to do. It's automatic. Your only job is to stop restarting cold.
2. What should snapshots catch? The interrupted work — sessions that die mid-task. Also automatic. Trust the save-point; work in longer arcs.
3. What should you /remember? The recipe itself, and the preferences that shape it. The workflow's steps, your voice rules, the standing facts (client names, targets, constraints). This is the part most people skip — and it's the part that compounds.
4. What do you leave to /search? Everything you talked about along the way — the ideas, the rejected options, the "maybe later" threads. Don't file them. Let them pile up findable.

Do this (the live fill)

1. Open the Memory Layer Design Worksheet — it walks the four questions for your chosen workflow.
2. Write the /remember entries it produces — most workflows need only two or three. Brief them like you'd brief a sharp hire.
3. File them, close the session, open a fresh one, and run the workflow with a single sentence: "Do the weekly review."
4. Watch the agent execute from memory. That's the whole hour, landed.

Look at the climb

• Rung 1 — you saw the amnesia and named the four tiers
• Rung 2 — journals and snapshots: free memory, already running
• Rung 3 — /remember and /recall: memory on purpose
• Rung 4 — /search: nothing is ever lost
• Rung 5 — a designed memory layer for a real workflow

An hour ago your agents woke up every morning with no idea who you are. Now they carry your context — the workflows, the preferences, the facts — and you direct instead of re-explain. Memory + direction is how a chatbot becomes a colleague.

Keep building

• Agent Cheat Sheet — the prompt buckets that pair with everything you just built.
• FAST Framework — the full system: Factory of Agents with Skills and Tools.
• The Agentic Org Chart — where memory-fluent agents get org-chart seats.