The knowledge map
A view of what the model has learned about you.
If a product remembers, the product owes you a map of the remembering. The knowledge map is that map. It lists every fact the model holds about you, names where each fact came from, and makes three actions available per fact: pin it, edit it, or forget it.
Without the map, memory is surveillance. The model accumulates facts silently, some of them wrong, and nudges answers based on a profile the user has never seen. With the map, memory is a tool the user is in charge of.
"Memory without a map is surveillance."
Clustered by topic, with provenance.
Every stored fact belongs to a topic cluster — role, writing preferences, context about the user's team, and so on. Each fact carries three pieces of metadata the user must be able to see: where it came from (which turn), when it was last used, and whether it's currently pinned.
Pin, edit, and forget are the three primitives. Pin keeps a fact from being pruned when the system clears stale memories. Edit lets the user correct the fact without rephrasing it to the model. Forget removes it, immediately, with no confirmation modal — the friction has already been done.
Senior product designer on the billing platform.
from · Turn 4 · Apr 02last used · 2d agoFormer software engineer at a logistics startup.
from · Turn 12 · Apr 09last used · 11d ago
Prefers short sentences over lists.
from · Turn 7 · Apr 05last used · todayAvoids em-dashes.
from · Turn 3 · Apr 01last used · today
Team has 14 engineers, 3 designers, 2 PMs.
from · Turn 18 · Apr 14last used · 5d agoShips weekly on Thursdays.
from · Turn 22 · Apr 16last used · 3d ago
Persistence is a consent question.
The moment a product says "I'll remember this for next time," it has asked for something. It's asked the user to trust that the memory will be accurate, relevant, retrievable, and retractable. The knowledge map is the interface that makes all four of those promises concrete.
Products that ship memory without a map are making the promise without staffing the interface.
The map I'd ship.
- One fact, one line. A memory should be a sentence. Not a blob. Not a JSON object. The moment the format escapes a sentence, the user stops being able to reason about it.
- Last-used is the staleness signal. A fact that hasn't been touched in weeks is suspect. Surface the last-used timestamp. Let the user prune by age. Staleness is the dominant memory failure and it's easy to detect.
- Forget is instant. No confirmation, no delay, no soft-delete. The user picked forget; respect the verb. If you need a safety net, add undo — but not a dialog that asks the user if they're sure.
The ghost of a forgotten fact.
When a fact is forgotten, its consequences sometimes aren't. The model has already absorbed the fact into its short-term context and may reference it for the rest of the session. A good map makes this visible — forgetting a fact should clear any active reference to it, or tell the user it'll take effect next session.
Honesty about what forget does is more important than making forget feel instant.
What this pattern gets wrong when it gets wrong.
- Stale memory
- A persistent fact about the user that's out of date and silently poisoning answers.
- Leaky context
- Content from another source, session, or user surfacing in a place it shouldn't.
- Consent skip
- Capturing, transmitting, or acting on input the user didn't agree to share in this moment.
Three shipping variants worth copying.
- A topic-clustered list with per-fact edit and forget controls
- A 'last used' timestamp under each fact to surface staleness
- A source badge that links back to the turn a fact was learned in