The prompt change only reaches memories written after it. plan/18 decided to
leave the existing ones alone and let eviction age them out at
memory_bank_capacity, on the grounds that re-summarizing would duplicate
whatever was still in the bank because nothing deletes the old rows.
That was wrong about the only option. A memory can be rewritten in place. The
row carries more than its text — whether it is pinned, how often it has been
retrieved, and the node it hangs off, which is what makes a fork inherit the
right memories — and rewriting `text` keeps all of it. Deleting the bank and
rewinding the cursor would lose that, and would trickle memories back at
MAX_MEMORIES_PER_RUN per turn, so an adventure nobody is playing would never
recover.
tools/rewrite_memories.py does it. Without --write it makes no model calls and
only reports the scope; --write rewrites, --embed re-embeds in the run rather
than leaving it to the app's post-turn pass. It reads whichever database the
app reads, so it works against the hosted Postgres as well as a local file.
Two things it needed from the app. `summarize_block` is now the one place a
memory prompt is assembled, and the post-turn pass calls it too — a backfill
that built its own prompt would be writing memories with a prompt that never
shipped, and nothing would report the drift. `source_block` reads a memory's
block back out of the story, which nothing has ever had to do: it reads on the
lineage of the branch the memory was written on, not the branch being played,
because after a fork the same depths hold different actions on each side and a
read through the adventure's path would summarize the wrong story silently.
It also excludes the discarded attempts at a retried turn, and tolerates a
block an action has since been deleted from.
Left alone: a memory with no source range, which is hand-written or migrated by
62 and may be the player's own words; a memory whose actions are gone; and an
adventure whose owner has no API key, because summarization spends the user's
own key by construction and never the shared demo key. --api-key/--model/
--endpoint override that, the last of them aiming a run at claude_shim.py.
The vector is cleared for every rewrite, because the stored one describes
wording that no longer exists. Re-embedding always uses the owner's own
embedding model, never --endpoint: a vector only means anything against the
vectors it is ranked beside.
17 tests, 627 green. The fork case is the one that would fail quietly, so the
test builds a fork whose depths hold different actions on each side.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Tqgupw5CZGjSZrUTNUd4fW
