Consolidation

What consolidation does

Capture creates volume. Consolidation creates quality.

The job is to review recent inputs and decide what should be promoted into durable memory, what should stay as reference material, and what can be archived or ignored.

Without consolidation, a /Brain turns into a cluttered inbox. With it, the system compounds.

A simple weekly loop

Once a week:

1. review _inbox/, notes, and voice captures
2. extract durable lessons into MEMORY.md, frameworks/, or decisions/
3. prune duplicates and obvious noise
4. refresh context/now.md if priorities shifted

This is enough for most people to maintain signal without over-engineering the process.

Promotion rules

Promote something when it is:

• likely to matter again
• clearer after review than it was during capture
• useful beyond one conversation
• specific enough to change future decisions or behavior

If it is only interesting in hindsight but not likely to matter again, keep it out of startup files.

Example promotion flow

Raw capture:

Need stronger session-start instructions. Agents keep giving too much preamble.

Durable memory:

- Prefer direct answers with minimal preamble during iteration.

Framework or decision:

# Session-start response style

## Decision
Lead with the answer. Add rationale only when it improves the decision.

Common mistakes

• reviewing too rarely, so the inbox becomes emotionally expensive
• promoting everything, which bloats durable memory
• never deleting noise
• confusing useful reference detail with startup-critical context

Next steps

• Read Maintenance for file-size discipline and review cadence
• Read Examples to see how promoted knowledge can look