Multi-agent work in three spoonfuls II: auditable memory

In the first post I described how I organized my local multi-agent setup, penta-agent : Codex executes, Claude reviews, other agents enter in bounded ways, and the human keeps closure authority. I also argued that operational memory should not depend on a single conversation or be confused with the vector index. By the time I closed that first post, I already had continuity mechanisms: handoffs, routing rules, append-only logs, experiential memory in JSONL/YAML, a rebuildable vector collection, and the recall-context skill. My problem was not absolute amnesia. It was that I still could not prove what the system retrieved, when it confused a coincidence with evidence, and when it should admit that it did not have an answer. This second part, then, is not about inventing memory from scratch. It is about turning still-fragile operational continuity into a traceable, testable, and rebuildable mechanism. The idea of an external working memory is not new. It echoes Bush's old ambition of augmenting recall through a personal archive and the extended-mind intuition that notes and tools can become part of cognition. 1 2 My claim here is narrower: local traces are useful only if I can retrieve them with provenance and audit how they were used. Spoonful 1: the problem was not storing, but retrieving well Storing information is easy. The difficult part, I think, is retrieving the right piece when there are successive decisions, similar names, contradictory versions, and explanations spread across several files. To organize that "memory" in my own setup, I separated its operational layers: Table 1 - System memory layers Layer Question it answers Effective implementation Canonical record What happened, and what was decided? memory/experience-events.jsonl , memory/experience-lessons.yaml , memory/interaction-metrics.jsonl , and curated context events. Retrieval index Where is the relevant evidence? Qdrant with penta_context_v2 for curated context and penta_experience_v1 for operat