Memo-As-Source Confusion
The agent trusts its own stale workspace notes as ground truth instead of re-reading the actual artifact.
Intent & Description
🎯 Intent
Citing internal memo files or workspace summaries as authoritative — without re-verifying them against the underlying artifact they describe.
📋 Context
An agent keeps running notes about repos, project status, or files it’’s read. These memos were accurate when written. Underlying systems move on. The agent treats its own past output as truth, accumulating false confidence in stale state.
💡 Solution
When making any claim about an artifact’’s state, read the artifact in the same turn — not the memo. If memo and artifact disagree, the memo is wrong — rewrite it from the artifact. Tag memos with a verified-at timestamp and refuse to trust them past a configurable age without re-verification.
Real-world Use Case
- The agent maintains long-lived memo files or status documents that summarize external artifacts.
- Workspace summaries are routinely cited in answers without re-reading the underlying files.
- Stale state has been confidently stated at least once and had to be corrected from outside.
Source
📌 TL;DR
Always re-read the source artifact directly — never trust your own workspace memo without re-verification.
Advantages
- (none)
Disadvantages
- Stale facts get stated confidently and reproduced across many turns
- Stakeholders lose trust when corrections come from outside the agent
- The agent loses calibration between what it “knows” and what it would find by actually looking