Consolidation

The bujo memory tier maintains itself with one scheduled consolidation pass that runs in-app — no external cron, launchd, or sidecar process. Consolidation is a lightweight, projection-only housekeeping cycle: refresh the living index.md, keep the retired future-log.md stub empty, and report how many exact-normalized duplicate groups were found.

The consolidate() operation itself is deterministic and makes no chat-model call. In v1, salience is static canonical Markdown metadata: scheduled consolidation does not decay it, and it never supersedes, deletes, or rewrites canonical memories. Journal content-hash identity and BuJo capture reconciliation prevent most new duplicates at write time. The in-app scheduler starts only for the strict bujo tier. Configuration therefore requires memory.mode: "bujo", embeddings, and memory.llm; omitting a prerequisite is a validation error, never a downshift to Journal. The lite and journal tiers do not run scheduled maintenance. For tier selection and the memory.llm block, see Capture & recall and the Memory overview. Coverage type: config.

The in-app scheduler

When the configured store tier is bujo, agent-app starts a consolidation scheduler alongside your channels.

Pass	What it does	Default cron
Consolidation	Refresh index.md, keep future-log.md empty, report the duplicate-group count; no canonical-memory mutation	0 */2 * * *

The scheduler starts with the app and stops cleanly on shutdown. The pass is error isolated: a failed consolidation is logged and the scheduler carries on.

Overlap protection: a new run is skipped if the previous consolidation is still in flight. Long passes will not stack up or run concurrently with themselves.

Cron expressions are evaluated by the in-app scheduler. The default runs every two hours because the projection pass is intentionally cheap and does not call an LLM.

Configuration

Consolidation lives under memory.consolidation with the same { enabled, cron } shape used elsewhere in config.

{
  "memory": {
    "mode": "bujo",
    "path": "./memory",
    "embeddings": { "provider": "ollama", "model": "nomic-embed-text:v1.5", "dim": 768 },
    "llm": { "provider": "ollama", "model": "qwen3.6:latest" },
    "consolidation": { "enabled": true, "cron": "0 */2 * * *" }
  }
}

Key	Type	Default	Meaning
memory.consolidation.enabled	boolean	true	Run scheduled consolidation
memory.consolidation.cron	string	0 */2 * * *	Five-field UTC consolidation cadence; hashed H fields are not supported

The consolidation schedule is evaluated in UTC. It accepts the shared parser’s five-field syntax, including named months and weekdays, but rejects hashed H fields because consolidation has no per-job identity from which to derive a stable hash seed.

Enable / disable

To keep the bujo tier but turn off scheduled consolidation, set enabled to false:

{
  "memory": {
    "mode": "bujo",
    "consolidation": { "enabled": false }
  }
}

You can also shift cadence — e.g. every four hours:

{
  "memory": {
    "mode": "bujo",
    "consolidation": { "cron": "0 */4 * * *" }
  }
}

Environment overrides

Each key has a MONO_AGENT_MEMORY_* env var that overrides the config value:

Env var	Overrides
MONO_AGENT_MEMORY_CONSOLIDATION_ENABLED	memory.consolidation.enabled
MONO_AGENT_MEMORY_CONSOLIDATION_CRON	memory.consolidation.cron

export MONO_AGENT_MEMORY_CONSOLIDATION_CRON="0 */4 * * *"
export MONO_AGENT_MEMORY_CONSOLIDATION_ENABLED=true

Retired memory.reflection.* / memory.migration.* keys and MONO_AGENT_MEMORY_REFLECTION_* / MONO_AGENT_MEMORY_MIGRATION_* env vars are tolerated but ignored. mono-agent validate reports value-free warnings when it sees them.

Living index files

Projection-only consolidation maintains these markdown files at the root of your memory.path:

• index.md — a living table of contents: entry counts, the top/most-relevant memories, and a bounded entity graph preview. The preview filters ephemeral calendar/time rows (date, datetime, day, duration, month, quarter, temporal, time, timestamp, week, weekday, and year) and collapses NFKC-, case-, whitespace-, dash-, and underscore-equivalent names to one lexical referent. It scans deterministic source pages until the inventory ends or the explicit 10,000-row safety ceiling is reached, retaining only bounded reconciliation state before rendering at most 50 rows. When canonical rows disagree on type, including a duplicate on a later source page after 50 output rows are already available, the preview omits the type instead of choosing one. This is projection-only: canonical entity ids, relations, and associations are not rewritten. The consolidation result reports the duplicate-group count separately.
• future-log.md — a retired compatibility stub. Consolidation writes it as exactly # Future Log and does not project future items there.

Because the whole bujo store is plain markdown on disk, these files are human-readable and diffable — you can browse them directly or commit them.

Why consolidation is projection-only

Canonical Markdown and the active SQLite index must move together. Any lifecycle feature that decays salience, merges duplicates, or supersedes existing facts therefore needs the same durable transaction, replay, validation, and rollback guarantees as capture and migration. V1 keeps the scheduled path deliberately small and safe. Richer lifecycle mutation belongs behind an explicit future feature or external plugin boundary, not an implicit timer that rewrites memory.

Verifying the schedule

mono-agent validate reports the configured cadence in its Memory section:

[ok] memory.mode     bujo
[ok] consolidation   0 */2 * * * (auto)

See Validation & CLI for the full liveness check. Validation reports scheduled consolidation only when the configured store tier is bujo; otherwise it reports that consolidation is not scheduled.

Caution

Scheduled consolidation needs a valid strict bujo configuration. Missing embeddings or memory.llm fails configuration instead of silently running a reduced tier. Manual deterministic consolidate() remains available to programmatic callers and has the same projection-only contract. Validate before relying on automated maintenance.

Manual / out-of-band runs

The standalone memory-bujo CLI that used to offer manual reflect, migrate, and index runs has been removed; any invocation now prints a removal error and exits non-zero. There is no longer a manual out-of-band path:

• index and reflect — removed with no one-for-one scheduled replacement. The in-app scheduler calls only projection-only store.consolidate(); it does not invoke either legacy operation.
• migrate — a removed historical v1→v2 workflow with no current CLI replacement.
• rebuild / rollback — use the config-aware mono-agent memory rebuild / rollback from the agent folder.

See Validation & CLI for the full command mapping and Deprecations for the removal record.