Use when a user wants cross-session personal context shared by compatible AI agents, or asks to load, save, inspect, archive, recover, clean up, or upgrade l...
Memory
persistent-skill-memory
Try itPersist a deterministic skill index into the agent system prompt. One stdlib-only CLI (index/prompt/inject/verify/stats/hook), idempotent marker-block injection, no truncation, offline.
What it does
Persist a deterministic skill index into the agent system prompt. One stdlib-only CLI (index/prompt/inject/verify/stats/hook), idempotent marker-block injection, no truncation, offline.
The skill document
Persistent Skill Memory
Field-authored in Arena Agent Mode (2026-07) managing a 180-skill workspace.
The problem
Installing skills to disk does not make an agent aware of them. Filesystem presence is not memory: the agent must re-discover them every session, and after a context reset or a snapshot wipe it behaves as if the skills were never installed. Symptoms:
- Solving from scratch a problem an installed skill already covers.
- Skill count grows, but effective capability doesn't.
- "What can you do?" gets a vague answer that ignores 170 installed skills.
The fix: index → inject → auto-refresh
1. Index. Walk every SKILL.md, parse YAML frontmatter name + description
(handling > and | block scalars), fall back to the first # heading, dedupe by
(owner, slug) since one skill can land under multiple paths.
2. Categorize. Keyword-bucket into ~10 domains so lookup is by need, not by memorized name. A flat 180-item list is unusable; grouped, it's scannable.
3. Compress. Full descriptions blow the prompt budget. The durable prompt gets
names only, grouped by category (~4.4 KB for 180 skills); full descriptions live in
SKILLS_INDEX.md, loaded on demand. Names are enough to trigger recall — the skill's own
SKILL.md is read before deep use.
4. Inject between stable markers so regeneration is idempotent and never duplicates:
<<>>
[Anti-stall / async] durable-task-runner, polling-best-practices, ...
[Agents / orchestration] agent-team-orchestration, ...
<<>>
Base standing directives live above the markers and are rewritten verbatim each time, so behavioral rules and the capability list can never drift apart.
5. Auto-refresh via hooks — the part people skip, and why indexes go stale:
| Event | Hook |
|---|---|
| Installing a skill | skill_add.sh wrapper: install, then re-index |
| Publishing an invention | tail of publish_inventions.sh |
| Restoring after a wipe | tail of restore_volatile.sh |
Manual indexing rots within days. Hooked indexing stays true.
Verification that actually proves it
Don't trust "the file was written". Install a new skill through the wrapper, then grep the live prompt for its name:
./skill_add.sh @owner/new-skill
python3 manage_system_prompt.py show | grep -q "@owner/new-skill" && echo REMEMBERED
Design rules
- Names in the prompt, descriptions on disk — respect the budget.
- Group by problem domain, never alphabetically only.
- Markers, not appends — regeneration must be idempotent.
- Dedupe by
(owner, slug). - Hook every mutation path; a manual step will be forgotten.
- Regenerate the whole prompt from a single source of truth.
- Prove it end-to-end against the live prompt, not the file.
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