How scoped memory works for teams.
Draft mockup · 6 min read
Single-agent memory can be greedy. Team memory cannot. The useful question is not only whether a memory is relevant, but whether this person, this agent, and this project should see it.
Scopes turn memory from recall into policy.
The five-scope model
Ambience treats scope as a first-class field, not a search filter supplied by the caller. A retrieval request can only return memories that match the current user's actual access.
Personal
Useful for preferences and private working notes. Not visible to teammates by default.
Team
Useful for conventions, sales plays, support patterns, and shared practice.
Project
Useful for implementation decisions, rollout notes, customer projects, and delivery context.
Sensitive
No default readership. Access requires explicit grants and leaves an audit trail.
What a scoped memory looks like
Use the new billing adapter for renewals
The renewal flow should move through the billing adapter so finance exports stay consistent.
Support replies should name next action
Every escalated support handoff includes owner, timeframe, and the first action the agent should take.
Access levels
Team and project membership is intentionally plain-language. The UI presents levels humans understand, then maps those levels to the underlying memory actions.
Can see memories shared with this team or project.
Can see and add memories, but cannot remove others' work.
Can organize and remove memories in this team or project.
Can manage memories and membership for this team or project.
How teams update memory
Scoped memory should be editable in the same places people notice it. A teammate can correct a stale note, narrow the scope, promote a private pattern to a project, or revoke access without leaving the work surface.
Amend
Change the body, title, or tags while preserving the original audit trail.
Rescope
Move a memory from personal to project, team to sensitive, or back again.
Resolve
Merge duplicates and choose the current version when two memories disagree.
The important constraint is that updates are not quiet rewrites. Ambience keeps who changed what, which access rule changed, and why the new version should be preferred by future agents.