The memory bank and the story summary each kept a cursor: how many story
actions they had already covered. A count is a position in a list, and this
list moves — delete an action in front of the mark and every later one slides
down a slot, so the mark now covers one it has never read. All the cursor
bookkeeping existed to patch that up.
Both marks are now (branch_id, depth): the node up to and including which the
work is done. A depth is a coordinate along a path, not an offset into a list,
so nothing in front of it can move it. That deletes rather than rewrites
`position_of_index`, `note_action_removed`, `_rewind_cursors_to_index`,
`prune_dangling_memories` and the every-pass clamp in `run_post_turn`.
A memory hangs off the node its block ends on, so a fork inherits its
ancestors' memories without copying any, and retrieval selects through the
branch clause over the *whole* lineage — recall is long-range by definition and
cannot be windowed. Measured: 1,807 B on a story forked twenty times against
1,823 B on a flat one of the same length.
Migrations 53-56 translate the old counts into nodes. They rewrite `adventures`
and not `actions`, so this one needs no VACUUM FULL.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017Dvvqn9ZDR4ixeFPHNbww7
Three fallout bugs from keeping the retried action row alive (906ba42),
plus two long-standing cursor bugs the same investigation turned up.
Retry context leak: the row being regenerated is still attached to the
adventure, so it was replayed as established story and the model wrote a
continuation of the attempt it was meant to replace — the story visibly
blended both takes. It leaked into four places, not one: history replay,
story-card trigger matching, in-scene NPC detection, and the memory-bank
similarity query. Adds a shared context.story_actions(exclude_action_id),
threaded through build_context and retrieve_memories.
Memory holdback: a memory could summarize the just-generated turn; retry
rewrites Action.text but memory_cursor has already advanced, so the memory
was never regenerated and went on describing narration no longer in the
story. settled_story_actions() holds the newest action back one turn —
only the last action is retryable, so that makes it unreachable. The
settled list is always a prefix, so cursors stay valid and nothing is
skipped. The run_post_turn clamp deliberately still uses the full count:
clamping to settled rewinds legacy adventures a step and double-covers an
action.
Cursor bookkeeping: memory_cursor is a position into story_actions() while
Memory.source_* are Action.index values, and the two diverge as soon as
anything is deleted. Deleting a middle action slid a never-summarized
action into the covered range, skipping it forever; and pruning a memory
left the actions it covered stranded behind the cursor. Adds
note_action_removed() (called before the delete in delete_action and
undo_turn) and a rewind in prune_dangling_memories. delete_action also
now prunes at all, which it never did.
Not addressed: editing an already-summarized action still leaves its
memory stale, and the cumulative story summary can't have one fact
un-mixed from it.
117 backend tests pass, including new test_memory_settling.py (12) and
two retry-context regression tests.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01UeQVy5bEjLhfgWNc27Efet
