--- title: Memory description: Everything you connect becomes searchable memory — private to each person, never governing, and the thing that lets Ask answer questions no rule covers. --- Core concepts # Memory Memory is everything else. Briefs, proposals, notes, emails, pages from your site, files you've uploaded: read, split into passages, and indexed so they can be found by meaning rather than by exact wording. Memory answers *what happened*. The [Playbook](/concepts/playbook) answers *what we do*. Keeping them apart is the point. ## What lands in memory - Everything from a connected source: Google Drive folders you sync, Notion pages, your website, GitHub repositories, Gmail labels. - Every file you upload. - Outcomes your AI tools report back — "proposal accepted", "client asked for plainer language". - **Also the documents behind your rules.** A rule's document is a document like any other; being a rule doesn't remove it from memory. ::: info What you told Vythos about your agency isn't memory What you do and who you work for is your workspace's own description of itself. It isn't evidence and it isn't a rule, so it lives in neither: it's configuration, shown in Settings, shared with everyone in the workspace, and sent with every question so a tool knows whose work it's doing. It's never quoted as policy. ::: ## Memory is private to each person Each person's memory is their own. Your colleague's uploads are not searchable by you, and yours are not searchable by them — the workspace owner included. What *is* shared is the Playbook, filtered by each person's access. That's the design: one agreed set of rules, and private working material. ## Memory never becomes a rule Nothing in memory governs anything. It's never promoted, never scored, never turned into policy. A proposal that quotes a day rate does not change your rate card; it's a record that a number was once quoted. Making a document a rule is always a deliberate act. See [A rule is a document](/concepts/rules-and-documents). ## How Ask uses both When you ask a question, Vythos gathers: 1. **Rules you're allowed to see** that bear on the question — clients first, then by category. 2. **Passages from your own memory** that match. It also knows who your agency is and which clients you've added, and — for a follow-up — the last few turns of your conversation, so it knows what you're referring to. None of those is a source of facts. The answer is written from the rules and the passages, with rules ranked above documents. Where a rule and a document disagree — an old email saying 30 days, the rule saying 45 — Vythos answers with the rule and tells you the document disagrees. That's usually a prompt to go and fix the document. See [Ask](/using-vythos/ask). ## Freshness Connected sources are re-read on a schedule: Notion about every 15 minutes, Google Drive about every 30. When a source has gone quiet for a few rounds, Vythos checks it less often, and speeds up again when something changes. You can always sync a source by hand from the Sources page. When a document changes, its passages are **replaced**, not added to — so a superseded version can never come back later as an answer. ## Removing things from memory | What you do | What happens | |---|---| | Upload a changed file with the same name | Its old text is replaced | | Disconnect Notion | Notion's credentials **and everything it put in your memory** are removed | | Disconnect Google Drive | Access is removed. What Drive already put in your memory stays, and rules whose documents live in Drive stop being able to follow them | | Delete the workspace | Everything goes: rules, memory, clients, connections, history | ::: warning Disconnecting Drive doesn't undo the reading If your reason for disconnecting is to remove the content, disconnecting alone won't do it today — Notion clears its memory on disconnect and Drive doesn't. Deleting the workspace removes everything. If you need Drive's memory cleared without deleting the workspace, ask us. ::: Next: [Add a rule](/using-vythos/add-a-rule).