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Worthiness gate + dedup ​

memory_remember is the only write path that doesn't pass through a per-user retrieval check. Two filters run before the entry hits Postgres: a worthiness gate (rejects junk) and a SHA-256 dedup (collapses duplicates).

Worthiness gate ​

Implemented as MemoryEngine.shouldReject(content) returning null (fit to store) or a short reason string. Two rules:

  1. Too short — content.trim().length < 12. A 12-char floor is a heuristic for "not durable knowledge." Single words, single emoji reactions, and most filler chat are blocked.
  2. Conversational filler — regex match against ^(thanks?|ok(ay)?|sure|got it|great|cool|yes|no|nope|yep|alright|noted|done)\.?$. Closes the obvious "the agent said 'ok' and remembered it" failure mode.

When rejected, memory_remember returns:

json
{ "id": null, "rejected": "too short — not durable knowledge" }

Bypass with force ​

Set force: true on the remember call to skip the gate:

json
{ "content": "x", "force": true }

Use only when you know what you're doing — short anchors (project ids, version pins, phone numbers) are valid; "ok" is not.

SHA-256 dedup ​

Even past the gate, an entry whose content (after normalisation) hashes to a value already present in the same scope is collapsed to the existing id:

content_hash = sha256(normalize(content))

Normalisation: lowercase, collapse internal whitespace, trim. Two writes of "Tokio is the de-facto async runtime." (with different casing or extra spaces) produce the same hash.

The dedup response surfaces the existing id:

json
{ "id": "01KQW8EKAJYNTVSGA283SF2ZGQ", "deduplicated": true }

The original entry's hits counter is incremented — duplicates count as positive signal that the content is worth keeping.

Scope of dedup ​

Dedup is per (user, project, namespace) — the same content under different namespaces stays as separate entries. Reasoning: namespaces exist precisely so the same fact can be filed under multiple categories ("decisions" + "incidents") without collision.

What the gate doesn't do ​

  • Doesn't verify factual accuracy. That's the agent's job.
  • Doesn't check for PII. novamem is unaware of content semantics.
  • Doesn't scan for prompt injection. Memory entries are content the user wrote; if your agent threatens to be tricked by what it remembers, that's an upstream concern.

Source ​

packages/server/src/engine/index.ts — shouldReject() and the dedup branch in remember().