agent-memory-atlas: Skill for Codex

Use the Atlas

The other three skills in this repository grow the corpus. This one spends it.

The failure this skill exists to prevent: an agent pointed at 155 reports reads widely, finds the most rigorous mechanism, and builds it. The result is a tombstone and a governed write gateway on a single-user notes app that needed scoped SQLite and an explicit write path. The atlas's own pattern index says the correctable stack is "one stack among several, not a bar the others fail to clear" — and a warning addressed to a human reader does not constrain an agent unless something makes it.

So the discipline here is subtractive. Adopt the smallest set that closes a failure this product can actually suffer, and write down what you deferred.

Pick a mode first, and do not drift out of it

The four jobs people ask for are different, and three of them do not touch the target repository. State which one you are in before you start, and treat approval of an artifact as approval of that artifact only — a person who approved a build brief has approved a design, not a commit.

Mode	You produce	You may modify the target repo
decide	which patterns this product needs, and why	no
design	the build brief	no
review	a closure report over the memory that already exists, with the open rows named	no
build	brief → separate approval to implement → code and tests	yes, after that second approval

Default to the narrowest mode the request supports. "What does my memory design need?" is decide. "Review my memory implementation" is review and ends with a report — the gaps it finds are findings, not a work order. Moving from design to build needs the developer to say so after reading the brief; the brief being approved is not that sentence.

What you read, and what you do not

Do not read the system reports. Read these, in order:

1. content/patterns/index.md § How to use the library — failure → pattern.
2. The same page's § Stacks, by what you are building — five profile rows, each naming the failure that hurts for that shape, each with a what you can defer paragraph.
3. The pattern pages you selected — Cost to adopt, Tradeoffs, Implementation checklist, Tests to require, Seen in the atlas — start from its Read these first list where the page has one.
4. content/overview.md § 8 What I Would Build (ship-first order) and § 10 Practical Checklist.
5. content/benchmarks.md § 6 and § 7 when you need the deletion and contradiction tests in detail.