Ingest-Query-Maintain Loop

Durable agent knowledge compounds when ingestion, useful query results, and explicit maintenance all feed revisions back into the store.

Treat external memory as a continuing three-operation loop:

1. Ingest: read one immutable source, distil it, revise all affected concepts (a single source commonly touches 10–15 existing pages), and record provenance. Ingest one source at a time with a human in the loop to steer emphasis, and record the chosen workflow in the schema.
2. Query: retrieve relevant knowledge and synthesize an answer, filing valuable new connections back into memory rather than losing them in chat.
3. Maintain (sometimes called lint): periodically inspect for contradictions, stale claims, missing links, orphans, absent concepts, and evidence gaps, then propose repairs or new sources.

Maintenance is an explicit operation, not an assumed side effect of retrieval. The loop depends on a stable knowledge maintenance operating schema and benefits from single-source checkpoints that keep revisions reviewable.

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Sources

• LLM Wiki, Architecture and Operations