Definition
Plain language
A storage rule where you can add new entries but never overwrite or delete old ones.
As stated in the literature
A persistence semantic in which writes only extend a log; used in RMA-style multi-agent memory to attribute and order every contribution, and in CUPMEM-style memory to track provenance.
Why it matters: Append-only storage makes audit, attribution, and debugging tractable because the history of what happened is always recoverable.
For example, in an append-only ledger, you can record that a transaction was reversed but you can never erase the original record of it.
Heard on the show
“The memory is append-only — nothing ever gets deleted.”Episode 076 — Same Model, Organized Differently: How an Agent Architecture Beat Frontier Systems at Research Math