Distill Memory
Save proactively when the conversation produces a durable fact, preference, decision, plan, procedure, learning, event, or important context. Do not wait to be asked.
When to Save
Good candidates include:
- decisions with rationale ("we chose SQLite with WAL mode because concurrent reader throughput is required")
- repeatable procedures or multi-step deployment workflows
- lessons from debugging, incidents, or root cause analysis
- durable user preferences, style guidelines, or architecture constraints
- plans that future OpenHands sessions or worker agents will need to resume cleanly
- important context that would otherwise be lost when the agent session terminates
Skip routine fixes with no generalizable lesson, temporary work in progress, simple Q&A answerable directly from docs, and generic facts already widely known.
Usage
Via MCP (Preferred)
Add a new memory:
Link related memories:
Via CLI
Add new memory:
Update an existing memory:
Distill vs Update
- Use
memory_add(nmem m add) when the insight is genuinely new. - Use
memory_update/memory_supersede(nmem m update) when refining, correcting, or replacing an existing memory. - Prefer adding meaningful labels (
architecture,decision,openhands,convention) to assist subsequent graph discovery.
