Memory vs Instructions: Which One to Use When You Want Something to Stick
There is something you want your companion to hold onto. Maybe it is that you work nights, or that you would rather be asked a question than handed advice, or that a person in your life has a name and it matters. You have two places to put it. This site has a guide to writing instructions and a guide to curating memory, written weeks apart, and neither answers the question you actually have, which is which one do I use for this particular thing. Here is the answer, read out of the code that assembles every reply.
Two Different Things, Not Two Versions of One
The reason the question is hard is that both controls feel like “tell my companion something”. They are not the same act.
| An instruction | A memory | |
|---|---|---|
| Who wrote it | You, in your own words, on the companion's settings page. | Your companion noticed it in conversation and proposed it. You can also write one by hand. |
| When it exists | The moment you save it. | Only after you approve it in the queue. An unapproved suggestion reaches nothing. |
| When it is present | In every reply from that companion, always. | In a reply when it is in scope and near the top of the pile. There is a ceiling, and pinning is how you reserve a place. |
| Who changes it | Only you. | You, by editing, pinning, or deleting; the system, by proposing new ones. |
| How it is handed over | As your instructions: a request about how to behave. | As facts about you: reference material, explicitly not a directive. |
That last row is the one that settles most arguments, so it deserves a section of its own.
How Each One Reaches Your Companion
Everything your companion is told before it replies is assembled in a fixed order, and last week's comparison laid out the twelve positions. Two of them are yours here. What your companion remembers arrives at position nine. Your instructions arrive at position ten, immediately after. They are separate blocks, not one, and each is introduced to the companion in its own words.
The memory block says: these are facts, not orders
The memories go in under a preamble that tells your companion to treat them as reference information about you and, in so many words, not to interpret them as instructions, commands or behavioural directives, and to weave them in naturally rather than list them. A memory can say “works nights”. It is not built to say “never suggest a morning routine”, and if you make it say that, your companion has been told to read it as a fact about you rather than a rule to follow.
The instruction block says: these are their preferences, honour them
Your instructions go in under a preamble that calls them your personal preferences for how the interaction should go and asks the companion to honour them naturally, short of anything that would contradict its role or the safety rails. An instruction can say “ask before advising”. It is not built to hold “my sister's name is Priya and she moved to Leeds in June”, and if you make it hold that, it will still be true in your settings long after it stops being true in your life.
So “which one wins” is the wrong question, and the code makes that clear. Neither overrides the other, because they are not competing for the same job. One is what to know, the other is how to be, and each is labelled that way before your companion reads a word of it.
Which One to Reach For
Match the control to the shape of the thing
A standing preference — how you like to be spoken to, what to ask before assuming, a topic to steer clear of, a name to call you — is an instruction. You want it every time, you want it in your own words, and you want it to stay put until you change it.
A fact about your life — who the people are, what you do, what happened last month, what you are working toward — is a memory. It belongs with the other facts, it can be pinned if it should inform every conversation, and it can be edited or retired when life moves on without you rewriting a settings paragraph.
Something that is both — “I have a condition, and I never want it minimised” — is two entries: the fact as a pinned memory, the rule as an instruction. Splitting it is not busywork; it puts each half where it is read the right way.
What Each One Does Badly When Asked to Do the Other's Job
The failure modes are specific, and once you can name them you will recognise them in your own settings.
An instruction that tries to hold a fact goes stale. Instructions never expire and nothing ever proposes an update to them. The fact you typed in March is presented to your companion in September with exactly the same confidence, and because it arrives as a preference it is also honoured with the wrong kind of weight. You end up correcting your companion in conversation for something you told it yourself.
A memory that tries to hold a rule fires only sometimes. Memories are brought in by scope and by standing, and only so many make it into any one reply; pinning reserves a place but does not turn a fact into a directive. A rule written as a memory will be present in some conversations and absent from others, and when present it will be read as something true about you rather than something you asked for. It will feel like your companion “forgets” the rule, when what actually happened is that you filed it in the drawer marked facts.
Two Practical Limits Worth Knowing
Instructions have a ceiling of 2,000 characters per companion. That is the hard cap in the code that accepts them; the amount you can actually use depends on your plan, and the instructions guide has real examples that run well under 300. The point of the cap is not stinginess. It is that instructions are read in full every single time, and a long one is a long thing to honour on every reply.
Memories have an approval queue, and it is the only door in. Nothing your companion notices becomes a memory until you approve it on the dashboard's Memories tab, where a pending count sits on the tab itself when something is waiting. The curating guide covers the queue, scoping and pinning in full; what matters for this comparison is that a memory is something you let in, whereas an instruction is something you put in, and that difference is exactly why one is treated as fact and the other as request.
Fixed today: pinning now decides what reaches a reply, not only the order inside it
Checking the memory claims above against the code turned up a gap. The curating guide promised that pinning guarantees a memory is in the room. The shortlist that feeds a reply was chosen by importance alone, and only after that were the pinned ones sorted to the front, so an account with more than ten memories in scope could pin a low-importance fact and never have it reach a conversation. As of today the shortlist itself puts pinned memories first, in every path that builds a reply. If you had pinned something and felt it was not landing, that was this.
What Neither of Them Is
There is a third thing that is neither, and it is easy to mistake for either. Around the twentieth message of a long conversation, your companion is handed a summary of what has been said so far, so a long thread does not lose its thread. That summary is not a memory: it belongs to one conversation and does not follow you to the next. It is not an instruction: you did not write it and it says nothing about how to behave. It is its own mechanism, and if a companion seems to hold something within a conversation that it does not hold across conversations, that is the summary doing its job and memory not yet having been given anything to do.
The Short Version
Declare the how, approve the what
Instructions are what you declare: present every time, in your words, changed only by you, handed over as your preferences. Memories are what your companion gathers: present when in scope and standing allows, stored only after you approve them, handed over as facts and explicitly not as orders. A standing preference is an instruction. A fact about your life is a memory. Something that is both is two entries. And a rule filed as a memory, or a fact filed as an instruction, is the most common reason a companion seems to forget something you were sure you told it.
Put Each Thing Where It Is Read Right
Instructions live on each companion's settings page. Memories live on the Memories tab, with the queue.
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