Vouch

Without intervention, an agent begins forgetting at the instant the session ends. Every new conversation opens cold — a confident expert who has never seen this codebase. It re-derives. It re-asks. It re-fixes the bug you fixed in March. The cleverness is fully preserved; only the memory of having decided is lost.

In an untrained nervous system this is called the cold-start problem. A pianist without rehearsal must read every note. A mechanic without callus must measure every bolt. The remedy in flesh is well known: repetition cathects retention — a path traced enough times becomes the path of least resistance. The agent has no such path. Every session is the first session.

Vouch furnishes the path. It places, in the project itself, a small persistent organ that records what the agent has done and why — but only after a second pair of eyes signs the record. The cost is one extra step. The benefit is permanence.

Muscle memory is what the body knows without thinking. The pianist does not recite the fingering of a sonata; her hands remember. The mechanic does not look up the torque of a head bolt; his arm recognises the give. In neurology this is procedural memory — knowledge encoded by repetition into a pathway so well trodden that recall feels involuntary.

Vouch is that pathway for an agent. A claim is proposed (the action), a human approves (the rehearsal), the record persists in the repository (the engram). When the next session arrives and the agent reaches for the same problem, the recall is already there. It does not have to be derived again.

Vouch is muscle memory for the agent — knowledge encoded by review, recalled without effort.

The pieces are unromantic and that is the point. Plain markdown on disk. Plain YAML for claims. A SQLite cache it can rebuild from scratch. Every motion logged. The kind of thing you trust enough to commit.