Looking Something Up Should Not Change Your Memory
An agent searches its memory constantly, and that is good behavior. It should not reshape what the memory holds. In Curator, an agent's search now reads your memory and writes nothing.
An agent with a memory tool searches it constantly. It looks up a decision before an edit, checks a convention, goes back to the same note three times in one task because the first answer was not quite what it needed. That is exactly what you want it to do. It should not change your memory.
Until this month, in Curator, it did. Each search left a mark on what was stored, and how often a memory was looked up counted toward how much it was trusted. Across hundreds of agent searches, that pulls a memory toward what agents went looking for, and away from what you decided and what held up.
A search is a read
Now an agent’s searches read your memory and write nothing. On the check that proved it, every one of 80 test searches left the store exactly as it was; before the change, each of those searches wrote to it. How often a memory is looked up no longer counts toward how much Curator trusts it.
That holds for every way an agent can search: plain recall, loading a project’s context, looking for related or conflicting memories. All of them read the same store, and none of them changes it.
Recall is the part that counts
There is still one path that notes what it showed. When Curator decides on its own to bring a memory to your agent, unasked, because it bears on the work in front of it, it keeps track of what it has already shown in that session. That is the recall Curator is built around: the memory reaching the work, not the agent reaching into the memory.
A search is the agent asking a question. A question changes nothing.
Why it matters
The value of a memory layer is that what it holds reflects you: the decisions you made, the corrections you gave, what held up when it was tested. Curator ranks memory by truth, not by what’s loudest, and a search count is about as loud as a signal gets. Keeping searches read-only means an agent can look things up as often as it needs to without slowly rewriting what your memory thinks matters.
It also makes searching safe to do freely. An agent never has to weigh whether a lookup will tilt something, and neither do you when you go digging through your own history.
Where it stands
Curator is a working pre-release product that runs on your own machine and reaches your agents over MCP. Follow release preparation.
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