Definition
Plain language
A shared workspace where notes can be added but never deleted.
As stated in the literature
A coordination pattern in multi-agent systems (e.g., RMA) where every contribution is timestamped, attributed, and immutable, preventing agents from overwriting each other's work.
Why it matters: It eliminates a whole class of multi-agent bugs where contributions are lost or attributed to the wrong agent.
For example, in an append-only memory, two agents writing about the same topic both leave timestamped notes side by side instead of one silently overwriting the other.
Heard on the show
“And there's an append-only memory the system keeps across iterations, so it doesn't repeat dead approaches or lose a file path it already found.”Episode 177 — Why Raw Profiler Data Made an AI Worse at Writing GPU Code