Manual/Everyday work

Memory, notes and retro

Chapter 08 · 3 min read

moh keeps three different things across time, on purpose kept apart: a small memory of durable facts, your own notes, and the full conversation, summarised when it gets long. A fourth, the retro, looks back at how the work went and suggests improvements — only for you to approve.

What moh remembers between conversations#

After each exchange, a small helper running in the background picks out facts that seem durable — your conventions, decisions, preferences — and adds them to the project's memory. Next time, you don't repeat yourself. A discreet indicator appears when the memory changes.

Memory lives in ~/.moh/projects/<project>/memory/: plain text files you can open and read. Facts are only ever added; when two disagree, the newer wins and keeps a dated note.

Project notes#

Press ctrl+n to open the notes editor: a scratchpad for the project — a to-do list, a reminder for tomorrow, a link you need. Every conversation in the project sees the same notes.

Long conversations#

An AI can only hold a limited amount of text "in mind" at once — its context window. The gauge at the bottom of the screen shows how full it is. When a conversation passes about 80% of it, moh compacts automatically: it writes a faithful summary of the older part — the task, the decisions, the next steps — keeps the last ten exchanges word for word, and carries on.

• Type /compact to do it yourself, now.
• The summary is an addition to the file, not a replacement: the full history stays on disk forever.
• If a provider says "this is too long" with a smaller limit than expected, moh learns that number for the rest of the conversation and tells you once.

Retro: what to fix next time#

When a conversation closes, moh quickly reads its log — with simple checks, no AI call, nothing sent anywhere — and notes what a careful reviewer would notice about your project's setup. For example:

• your project defines lint and test scripts, but nothing runs them automatically before a commit or in CI;
• the same slow command was run four times in one session.

A second pass looks for advice about how to find your way around the code and which coding rules to write down; it runs only every ten conversations, never after each one.

1. Notice. At the start of a session, one line tells you when new findings are waiting — at most once every two days.
2. Review. /retro (or moh retro in the terminal) lists them, most confident first, with the evidence behind each.
3. Apply, or dismiss. a shows the exact change — a rule for CODING_STANDARDS.md, a pointer in AGENTS.md — and writes it only after you confirm, as a new line under a ## Retro findings heading. Your existing text is never edited. A change that isn't text, like a hook or a CI job, is described for you to make. d dismisses a finding for good, and dismissing a kind of finding repeatedly makes moh stricter about proposing it.

Written for moh 0.61. Inside moh, ctrl+h opens the built-in manual for your exact version.