Shared memory can be controlled with editable text instructions

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 15:05

   the the issue is there's a lot of stuff in my broad general context that probably shouldn't be shared with other people right sometimes it's sensitive confessional one person's point of view on another person like whatever right so i've actually created for my own wiki two versions of it one is the i think of kind of clawed on my main laptop where i do my work as an extension of myself and a second brain type of thing. So this thing is not taking on projects autonomously and running with them. It's just doing what I tell it to do. And it has the full wiki with all the gossip or whatever that's in there. I don't have honestly that much super sensitive stuff. I don't want to make it sound like it's more dramatic than it is. But nevertheless, people didn't expect that when they were telling me something, which could have been on a call or an email or a private Slack

2. 15:54

   message, that it was going to go into some central repository of an agent that was going to now talk to the world. So that one's just for me. I had it go through and create a version using the heuristic of what would be appropriate for a person to tell a human assistant. The sort of still private, but a little bit more public facing wiki where it would be appropriate for my human assistant to have your email and phone number.

3. 16:20

   Right. But it might not be appropriate for every detail of every conversation we've ever had to be in there. How are you thinking about, as you absorb all this historical information, being sensitive to what should and shouldn't be in memory such that it ought to be shared? The second part is like, how are organizations going to change now? Because I think this is all, we're rewriting the social contract potentially in real time.

4. 16:43

   So I think application or one strategy for everything that came before, but the answer might be like new social norms going forward. I want to get your take on that too. Yeah. This has been a vociferous debate inside the team. There has been two camps. There have been the camps that are like, frankly, I'm in that camp. There are like just two tiers of memory is enough, right? So there's the public team tier and then there's the private tier and the private tier contains everything and the public tier contains like stuff that's only private, public.

5. 17:10

   And some other members of the team have been saying what you've been saying. Like they've been saying like, no, actually even my private tier, I don't want to contain a lot of stuff. I want like a superpower private tier. And like, and then they'll try, there was like this whole thing like what if we defined multiple memory bubbles and the user can edit them and I'm like that sounds kind of overkill and so what we landed on and what these teammates landed on honestly is like they have edited their own meta memory prompt and the meta memory prompt is just a text file it's your memory.md file in your file system in lindy your memory agent has that memory prompt injected in its context window at every moment and so if you insert a line up there that's like, this is what I never want you to remember.

6. 17:52

   Just at the top or something. Anywhere in the file, really. But you can do that. This is what I never want you to remember. Oh, by the way, that other stuff that's like a sensitive topic, please remember it in that other file, in that other folder that's got out of you. And I don't want you to pull this file or this folder unless X, Y, or Z. Right? So you can just like leave these instructions. And so that's another reason why I'm bearish rag and I'm bullish text and file system is you can inspect the memory and you can edit it and you can just like very granularly insult this kind of guardrails.

7. 18:27

   Yeah, interesting. So you, just to make sure I understand can repeat it back. One source of ground truth and you create different lenses on that information just by prompting. So you can have your, I could tell my agent like, hey, just so you know, this contains everything I've ever, every conversation I've ever had. always use the heuristic of you should only really be using information that would have been appropriate for me to share with a human assistant and if it doesn't seem appropriate then don't use it and obviously instruction following is getting extremely good so I can see pretty well. Actually I was misspeaking like there is a time when I have used this and it's literally for this podcast. I was preparing to go on this podcast and I knew I was going to talk about the memory agent so you see here I have like a memory MD

8. 19:13

   which is my actual memory file and then I have a memory 2md which is like a sanitized memory file where i've removed overly sensitive information and you can see in my memory md here there is like not a bini the file system also contains a memory 2md file ignore its contents they are just here for the users demoing lindian podcasts oh yeah you can just you can just do your own thing here yeah okay cool i do that because my version does have