Continuity and memory

fidelis is a local-first memory substrate with no model call in its default recall path. What was stored is what comes back. That constraint is the whole design: a store that cannot paraphrase cannot silently rewrite a qualifier, drop a negation, or smooth an exception into a generality.

The trade is explicit. Verbatim recall does not compress, and it does not summarize. It gives up the thing that made summarizing memory attractive in order to remove the failure that made it dangerous.

Semantic Kernel's chat-history truncation reducer dropped the oldest messages once a conversation exceeded its window. The system prompt is the oldest message. Past a certain length, every conversation quietly continued without it.

This is the exact failure mode that memory work exists to prevent, occurring inside the memory machinery itself. The fix is merged upstream.

The Generative Horizon paper draws a distinction this path depends on. The generative horizon itself exists within a single generation and does not require persistent memory. Recursive interpretive conditioning is the separate, downstream process in which an output that was retained — as context, memory, policy, evidence, or authorization — changes a later horizon.

For a memory system the consequence is concrete: what you retain does not merely inform the next step, it can alter what the next step treats as already settled. A summary stored as a record becomes, on the next read, a premise.

Retrieval mutation is a stored passage coming back altered. Reduction drift is a summary that changes meaning while shortening. Hermeneutic drift is different again: the question stays the same while the referent moves, because the most recently retrieved passage pulls the model's sense of which document is in play to the foreground.

These have different causes and different fixes. A verbatim store addresses the first. Nothing in this catalog currently addresses the third.