memory-doctor

Memory doctor

Agent-memory is an unseen side-channel into every session's context window: facts accumulate there, often by accident, that the user never reviews and cannot govern. This skill drains it. Technically nothing should live in project memory — durable guidance belongs in homes the user controls (project docs, project skills/rules, user-level skills/rules), and the rest is garbage. Block by block, move each entry to its proper home or archive it, until memory trends toward empty and the user — not the memory store — decides what reaches the context window.

Golden rule

The skill guesses and recommends; the user decides. Every verdict, scope, form, and target is a proposal the user confirms or flips. When unsure, ask. Nothing is moved, deleted, or written without explicit per-item approval. For every block the user gets the whole fixed menu — relocate/merge, archive (delete), keep, or a custom action they type — never just the recommended verdict, never a pruned subset.

Locate the memory

Find the memory store for the current project. Its location is agent-specific — other agents store it elsewhere, or not at all. Claude Code example: slugify the project's absolute working-directory path by replacing each / with - and prefixing one -, then look for ~/.claude/projects/<slug>/memory/MEMORY.md (e.g. cwd /Users/me/app → -Users-me-app). If that path is absent, or the user runs a different agent, ask the user for the memory path. Only discovery is agent-specific; everything below is agent-agnostic.

Block = the smallest self-contained memory unit — typically one memory file plus its MEMORY.md index line, generally one fact each, though a store may group differently. If the memory is a single flat file with no index, treat each section as a block.

Flow

1. Scan (read-only). Read every block. To judge staleness you may read or grep project files, git, and governing docs — but make no mutation in this phase.
2. Triage table. Present all blocks as ONE narrow overview table that renders as a table, not a wrapped list: # | block | content (≤1 line) | verdict | why + target. Every cell is a summary: the content cell one line, the why + target cell folding justification, duplicate/garbage evidence, and relocate scope/form/path. Full detail for a block waits for its question (step 3). The table numbers each block (1…N); refer to a block by that number, in order, and never re-list block numbers out of sequence in surrounding prose.
3. Decide, one question per block, in strict index order (1 → last). Walk blocks by their table index — never group, batch, or reorder blocks, even when adjacent ones share a verdict; ask about exactly one block per prompt. For each, lead with the detail the table only summarized — a verbatim content excerpt plus the full justification — so the user can judge, then present its recommended verdict as the default, then the same fixed menu every time regardless of that verdict — relocate/merge, archive (delete), keep, or other (the user types a custom action). Never drop an option because it seems not to apply; the user must never have to type a standard option by hand. Record each confirmed choice and move straight to the next block — act on nothing yet; never skip a block or record a choice without its own explicit confirmation.
4. Execute, once every block is decided. Apply the recorded actions in index order, honoring the Safety rules below (relocate-before-delete, honest index). Doing all the work in one pass — never interleaved with the questions — keeps the decision phase a fast, uninterrupted Q&A.

Verdicts

• Duplicate — already covered by an existing project/user skill, doc, or rule. Cite the specific file (ideally line). Prefer a merge — fold any wording the block states better into the existing home — over a blind delete.
• Garbage — delete-worthy: stale (cites code/files that no longer exist — verify by reading/grepping, never assume), re-derivable (restates what the code, git, or a governing doc already makes obvious), or a one-off that never generalized. Never garbage on suspicion; the skill must have verified, and the user still confirms.
• Relocate — genuine durable guidance with no current home. Route by scope × form (below).
• Keep — real and durable, but no good home yet and not worth manufacturing one. Log it in the summary and leave the block untouched — do not annotate it as "reviewed"; that is just more context-window noise.

Routing for relocate (scope × form)

Both axes are proposals the user confirms or flips.

• Scope — "would this be true or wanted in a different project too?" Yes → user-level (the agent's own config home). No → project-level (a doc in the repo, or the repo's project-scoped skill/rule config). For user-level, do not assume reusable config lives in any particular managed repo; if it does, the user redirects on confirmation.
• Form — short standing behavioral constraint → rule; multi-step procedure with a trigger → skill; reference knowledge/design/context read when relevant but not an instruction → doc.

If using Claude Code: user-level config lives in ~/.claude/skills and ~/.claude/rules, project-level in the repo's .claude/skills and .claude/rules.

Do the relocation through self-improve — it finds the home, drafts the least-text edit, and applies it (routing the write through the matching compaction skill). This skill owns discovery, enumeration, classification, and the archive/delete path; self-improve owns writing the content into its home.

Safety

Memory files live outside the project repo and are not in git, so a delete is irreversible.

• Relocate-before-delete. A block's content leaves memory only once it has landed in a confirmed home (relocate/merge applied) or the user explicitly OKs it as worthless. Never archive or delete the source before the destination edit is confirmed-applied.
• Archive, don't rm. Worthless blocks are moved to memory/.archive/, not deleted — an archive folder costs nothing in context and stays recoverable.
• Keep the index honest. Update the MEMORY.md index line in the same step as any block removal or relocation: never orphan a file, never dangle a pointer to a moved or archived one.

Close

Print an ephemeral chat summary — no report file (that would just be new uncontrolled state). Include counts plus each block's disposition (relocated → where, merged, archived, kept, skipped), and list kept blocks with each one's "no home because…" reason. The real deliverables are the cleaned memory and the archive folder.