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Learning Notebook

The Notebook lets you teach a bounded lesson, review its sources, and decide whether an agent should use it later. Start with the complete report-format exercise.

Where to find it

Web: Brain Mem → Lessons → choose an agent. iPhone: Agents → choose an agent → Learning. Enable Learning Notebook in the saved agent first. Learning-related reads and writes require authorized access.

The lifecycle

  1. Draft: explicit Teach input or an enabled agent's proposal creates a candidate, with source quotations. No candidate means nothing was saved.
  2. Review: inspect the actual content, source, type, and limitations.
  3. Approve: only approved guidance becomes eligible for future use.
  4. Test: start a fresh chat with the same agent/owner; inspect the result.
  5. Disable or refine: remove unhelpful guidance from future runs. Restoration is another draft and another review—not instant reactivation.

Preference/fact guidance can be supplied to a future run; procedural skills can be retrieved on demand. Retrieval is bounded, not a promise to load every lesson into every prompt. Search is weighted keyword matching, so wording matters.

Which kind of memory should I use?

Need Mechanism Important distinction
“Remember the format I prefer” Notebook preference Explicit user preference, reviewed before use
“Reuse a verified procedure” Notebook skill A bounded procedure with evidence and pitfalls, not arbitrary installed code
“Search these manuals” Knowledge base Source documents can be updated and retrieved; not permanent personal policy
“Continue this conversation” Chat session Old conversation context can still contain a disabled lesson
“Inspect broader stored memory/rulebooks” Agent memory Separate storage and review mechanisms
“Learn from Studio repairs” Studio learning Workflow authoring/repair patterns, not this private Notebook

Controls that are easy to misunderstand

  • Propose useful lessons: permits proposals during suitable runs. It never means automatically approve them. Off still allows explicit Teach/review.
  • Loaded count: the guidance was made available; it is not an effectiveness score.
  • Helpful / Needs improvement: feedback for that lesson, not a self-modifying prompt.
  • Disable lesson: excludes future reads/runs; cannot erase already-sent context.
  • Draft restoration: creates a reviewable version; does not grant new tool access.

Privacy and limits

Private lessons are scoped to an agent and authenticated owner. Sharing one key shares an identity; issuing a different managed key may create a different Notebook scope. Do not treat this as personal isolation between users sharing an admin key.

The local database is permission-restricted but not encrypted by this feature. Approved content may be sent to the agent's configured model. Do not store credentials or assume cloud inference stays on your server. A source quotation proves provenance, not factual truth; facts may become stale.

For exact YAML/API fields, retention, source eligibility, and the boundaries of the Hermes-inspired learning cycle, see the technical reference.