Memory Guidelines

Memory guidelines tell agents what is worth remembering and how to organize, update, and retire knowledge in your memory space. They live in an editable Memory document named CLUMSIES.md by default.

Start with the Clumsies defaults or use your team's existing guidelines. You can edit the document and share it through your organization's normal review process. App updates preserve your changes.

Start with the defaults

1. Open Memory and select an empty Project.
2. Choose Preview guidelines and their sources to read the complete English template and its research references, or choose Set Up Guidelines to adopt it directly.
3. Clumsies creates the starter documents together as Drafts and opens CLUMSIES.md. Use Source to edit any document whenever your conventions change.

CLUMSIES.md
knowledge/README.md
procedures/README.md
lessons/README.md

The folder READMEs explain what belongs there; they contain no invented project facts. Preview lets you read each document before setup. Existing folders and custom guidelines are preserved. All new documents are saved in one local transaction, so a failed setup leaves no partial starter.

The Drafts contribute to this Project's Effective Memory before publication. To share them with other Projects, use the existing review and publication flow, then select the published resources in those Projects.

You can also choose File → New Memory to start with your own content. Adopting default guidelines is optional.

Use existing guidelines

Clumsies checks the configured path, current Project drafts, and Organization Memory before offering initialization. Existing guidelines are preserved. If the Organization already has the document, Use Team Guidelines adds that resource to the Project's selection; this requires Project administrator access. It does not create another copy.

A missing custom path is reported so you can restore the document or correct the configuration. It does not silently create the defaults at another path. A Draft that removes or renames the configured document must be resolved first.

The path is a location inside Clumsies Memory, not a file in your repository or plugin cache. The current custom-path setting belongs to the local daemon; the App does not yet offer independent per-Project path settings.

What the defaults cover

• Keep decisions, constraints, verified procedures, and lessons that matter to future work.
• Preserve your existing layout; new spaces can use knowledge/, procedures/, and lessons/ as needed.
• State applicability and keep reasons, evidence, and exceptions alongside the guidance they qualify.
• Update the existing document for the same topic; create a new document for an independently maintainable topic.
• Resolve conflicting claims using scope and evidence, and remove obsolete instructions from current guidance.

The document is ordinary Memory. It does not grant new permissions, authorize automatic writes, or install a host skill. The Memory tool continues to govern operations and Draft status.

Why these guidelines?

The defaults adapt published research and engineering experience to Clumsies:

Design choice	Source
Keep relevant information with enough context for correct action	Anthropic: Effective context engineering for AI agents
Check existing notes and consolidate knowledge instead of continually appending	LangChain: How we built Agent Builder's memory system
Prefer incremental changes that preserve specific knowledge	Agentic Context Engineering, v3

These sources inform the design choices; they do not validate this template's effectiveness. Adapt the defaults to your team's actual tasks and check whether updates preserve useful knowledge and reduce duplication.