Concepts
The few ideas the other guides take for granted, each in a paragraph, with a link to where it is explained in full.
On this page
Memories and their types
A memory is one standalone fact Oort kept from a conversation. The write path decides what is worth keeping: it scrubs secrets, asks a gate whether the turn holds anything durable, writes the facts, and reconciles each one with what is already stored. A repeat reinforces the old memory, and a contradiction supersedes it.
| Type | What it holds |
|---|---|
semantic | A fact: a port, a name, a decision. |
episodic | Something that happened, at a time. |
procedural | How something is done: a command, a sequence of steps. |
preference | How someone likes things done. |
judgment | An expert's decision with their reason. Recorded only on purpose, never inferred (Judgments). |
Each memory also belongs to a project, or is global. A command run in a repository reads that project's memories plus the global ones.
Tiers: hot, warm and cold
Tiers say how warm a memory is, and so how fast and how cheaply it comes back. Consolidation re-tiers memories, and expires and evicts old ones; the Claude Code hooks run it about daily. A cold memory that a recall returns is brought back in, and a pinned memory never goes cold.
| Tier | Also called |
|---|---|
| hot | Photosphere |
| warm | Kuiper Belt |
| cold | Oort Cloud |
Precision, storage and latency per tier are on the architecture page.
Spaces: your Planet, Stars and Constellations
Spaces say whose a memory is. When a recall mixes them, each memory says where it came from.
- Your Planet is your memory. Every agent you connect reads and writes it, so what Claude Code learned, Codex can recall.
- A Star is one agent's private memory, which no other agent reads. An agent always reads your Planet and its own Star, and writes to its Star only when it keeps one (
oort connect <host> --star). - A Constellation is memory shared with a team, in Oort Cloud (an invite-only beta). Nothing moves there by itself:
oort sharecopies one memory, on purpose.
In an app, each end user gets a Planet of their own (Multi-user apps). The details are in Agents: one Planet, a Star each and Constellations.
Time: what was true, and when
Oort closes a fact that changed instead of overwriting it. Each memory has a valid time (when it held in the world) and a transaction time (when Oort believed it). A fact that changed is superseded: it is closed, and still there for questions about the past. A fact that was wrong from the start is corrected: it never shows as having been true.
| Recall mode | What it returns |
|---|---|
current | What is true now. The default. |
as-of | What was true at a time, using everything learned since. |
history | Every version of the matching facts, oldest first. |
known-at | What Oort believed at a time, corrected facts included. |
Without a mode, recall reads one from the query: "what was the port in March" is as-of. See recall modes for the CLI flags, and recall options for the SDK.