JanitorAI chat memory: what to write and when to update it

Why the box exists

A model only sees as much of the chat as your context size allows. In a long story, the night two characters made a promise eventually scrolls out of that window and the bot no longer knows it happened. Chat memory sits outside the scrolling history, so whatever you write there is read every single time.

It belongs to the chat, not the bot. Two chats with the same bot can have completely different memories, which is exactly what you want when they are different stories.

A sample entry to copy

• {{user}} is Wren, a courier. {{char}} learned her real name in the flooded archive and has kept it to himself.
• They are hiding in the old lighthouse on Skerry Point after the warehouse fire.
• {{char}} has a cracked rib on the left side and hides how much it hurts.
• {{char}} promised to get Wren onto the dawn ferry. The ferryman wants forty silver; they have twelve.
• The ledger is sewn into the lining of Wren's coat. Nobody else knows.
• Relationship: trust rebuilt after the betrayal at the docks. Neither has said anything romantic aloud.
• Open thread: who tipped off the harbour guard?

Seven lines, under 100 words. Each one is something the bot would otherwise get wrong: a name, a wound, a number, a secret, a mood. Swap in your own story's facts and keep the shape.

Before the entry, a bot deep in a long chat might write "Wren laughed and pulled out the ledger to show the ferryman." After it, the same bot keeps the ledger hidden and has the character wince when he lifts the oars, because both facts are in front of it every turn.

Put in, leave out

Style rules such as point of view and reply length are covered in the JanitorAI custom prompt. Mixing them into memory makes both harder to maintain.

When to update it

• At a chapter break: a time skip, a new location, the morning after.
• After a reveal: someone learns a secret, a betrayal comes out, a name is spoken.
• When something changes for good: an injury, a death, a ring accepted or thrown back.
• The first time the bot gets a fact wrong. That is the clearest sign the fact has slipped out of view.

Also delete what is no longer true. A line saying the rib is cracked, ten chapters after it healed, keeps the bot writing a limp you no longer want.

Let the bot draft it, then edit

Writing memory from scratch is tedious, so ask for a draft. Send this as a message:

(OOC: Pause the story. In under 120 words, list the facts that matter so far as short bullet points: names, what each person knows, where we are, injuries, promises, secrets, open questions. No story prose.)

Copy the reply into chat memory, fix anything wrong, then delete the OOC exchange or swipe past it so it does not clutter the story. The general picture of AI memory, across every app, is in making AI remember your story.

If you run JanitorAI through a UnsavedAI key, a context size of 56,000 holds a lot of history before anything is trimmed, so memory matters most in genuinely long stories, where it keeps facts from the first chapters alive.

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