System architecture

A stable trust contract across changing memory infrastructure.

Vault separates retrieval from authority. Engines can rank candidates; only governed state determines what an agent may treat as usable memory.

Mode 01

Standalone, local-first memory.

For teams that want one governed memory vault without adopting another retrieval framework.

Agents & tools

Codex · Claude Code
OpenClaw · Hermes
n8n · Coze

Vault interfaces

MCP · CLI · Gateway · OpenAPI

  • Candidate-first writes
  • Bounded governed reads
  • Review and promotion

Local truth

SQLite + Markdown

Auditable, portable, rollback-ready.

Mode 02

Augment the engine you already use.

Vault does not need to own extraction, embeddings, or ranking to own the trust decision.

Memory provider

mem0 · Letta
AgentMemory · RAG

Returns ranked candidates.

Governance guard

Canonical snapshot + policy

  • Filter invalid candidates
  • Explain block reasons
  • Preserve provider ranking

Governed result

Allowed evidence
Sources · audit
Measured overhead

Memory lifecycle

Truth is a state machine, not an append-only vector.

Candidate

Agents submit observations without directly rewriting shared truth.

Review and policy gates

Privacy, duplication, quality, provenance, and scope determine promotion eligibility.

Promoted memory

Approved state becomes readable within explicit access and temporal bounds.

Supersede, expire, archive, restore

Lifecycle events remain auditable and reversible instead of disappearing into an opaque embedding index.

Multi-host trust boundary

Single-host sharing. Multi-host governed sync.

A conservative authority model reduces the risk that every remote runtime can mutate official shared memory.

Trusted local host

Shares one local Vault among same-machine agents and runs lifecycle automation.

Remote agents

Read approved memory and submit candidates; they do not promote official truth directly.

Central read layer

Optional derived vector index over reviewed safe summaries—not a second active-memory authority.

Architectural invariant

Backends may change. Governance semantics must not.

Approval, bounded access, candidate submission, promotion, lifecycle, audit, provenance, and reporting form the Vault Governance Contract.

Designed boundaries

  • Local-first by default
  • Optional cloud and self-host adapters
  • No mandatory Docker or PyTorch
  • Derived indexes are disposable
  • Official memory remains reviewable