Design Partner Notes — the pre-reset design-partner window Pilots
What this page covers
Three design-partner pilots ran during the pre-reset design-partner window: Zep, Letta, and Cognee. Each pilot produced a working adapter and surfaced feedback that shaped pre-reset spec protocol decisions.
Audience: Contributors and integrators evaluating stigmem for production adoption.
Zep
Feature record: features/zep-adapter
Implementation: experimental/zep-adapter/ (experimental opt-in adapter package)
Zep stores agent memory as session-scoped "propositions" extracted from dialogue. The adapter bridges these into stigmem facts and back.
Key integration pattern:
assert_to_zep(fact, session_id)
Encodes a stigmem FactRecord as a structured system message and appends it to a Zep session.
query_from_zep(scope, session_id)
Fetches Zep's extracted propositions and converts them to FactRecord-compatible dicts.
Feedback themes:
History flooding
Zep's proposition model is single-value-per-entity; stigmem's append-only facts give it more history. Adapters need a reconciliation step.
Scope as session boundary
Zep users wanted session-scoped facts to stay local. Using scope=local maps naturally — local facts never replicate.
Confidence passthrough
Zep extracts propositions at varying confidence. synthesize_scope correctly surfaces the lower-confidence alternatives.
Letta
Feature record: features/letta-adapter
Implementation: experimental/letta-adapter/ (experimental opt-in adapter package)
Letta is an agent framework with first-class persistent memory blocks. The adapter federates stigmem facts into Letta's in-context memory and back.
Key integration pattern:
Stigmem as coordinator
Shared multi-agent coordination layer; Letta's memory blocks hold the per-agent working copy.
Wake: synthesis injection
On agent wake, synthesize_scope produces a clean conflict-resolved snapshot that is injected into Letta's memory block.
Sleep: round-trip
On agent sleep, fact assertions in Letta's memory block are round-tripped back to stigmem.
The Letta pilot drove the alt_value / alt_confidence fields in SynthesisEntry.
Callers needed to see the losing value, not just know a contradiction
existed. Decay policies were also useful for memory block hygiene —
Letta agent memory tends to accumulate stale "task status" facts;
the memory:last_seen retract policy cleaned these automatically.
Cognee
Feature record: features/cognee-adapter
Implementation: experimental/cognee-adapter/ (dormant external adapter)
Cognee builds knowledge graphs from unstructured text. The adapter bridges stigmem's (entity, relation, value) triple model with Cognee's graph representation.
Feedback themes:
Namespace discipline
Without normalization against Spec-16-Namespace-Registry, Cognee runs used inconsistent relation URIs for the same semantic concept. The adapter now includes a relation normalization step.
Source provenance
Cognee users needed to know which document a fact came from. The adapter populates source=cognee:doc:<hash>.
Fuzzy entity resolution
Cognee often extracts the same entity with slightly different text forms. The fuzzy entity resolver was accelerated by this feedback.
Cross-pilot patterns
POST /v1/synthesis and synthesize_scope MCP tool.alt_value / alt_confidence.DecayPolicy and POST /v1/decay/sweep.Connector guides
For production wiring instructions, see the per-connector guides in the Connectors section (coming soon).