Answers
AI memory a person approves before it counts
Human-sanctioned memory means a person decides what becomes a rule, and the AI cannot promote its own guess to that status. In Arroway an assistant writes freely as it works, but anything it worked out on its own is filed as a proposal. A person turns proposals into standing rules — or edits them, or throws them out — on a review screen, after the fact. The work never waits on that review.
Last updated August 22, 2026
A proposal and a decision are two different things, and they stay different
When an assistant records something it inferred from the code or the conversation, it is filed as a proposal. When you said it, or approved it, it is filed as a decision. The two are stored apart, shown apart on screen, and handed to the next AI differently — so an assistant reading the project six months from now cannot pass a guess off as something the team agreed.
Review is a veto, not a gate
Nothing waits for you. Your AI reads and writes while you sleep; review is where you go afterwards to correct what should not have gone in. The screen gathers what is worth a look — what came in this week, proposals nobody confirmed, entries that have reached their expiry date, and what no AI has read in a month. You approve, edit or delete line by line, and a replacement is shown next to the rule it would replace. Skip a week and nothing breaks: meanwhile Arroway keeps the rules that matter most in front of your AI.
Every rule carries the thing that would kill it
A rule is written together with the condition that ends it or forces a re-check — a date, a named trigger, an explicit revocation. When that comes due, the rule goes back to you instead of asserting forever that something is still true. Where an entry came from and who approved it sit next to the rule for whoever is auditing; that never travels into the AI's read, where it would compete with the rule itself.
What it looks like in practice
Your assistant notices that every new service in the repository is named the same way, and records the convention. It turns up in your review marked as a proposal, not a rule — an AI worked it out, nobody agreed to it. You read it, rewrite one clause because the convention has an exception the code does not show, and approve it. From that moment it is a decision: every assistant on the project reads your version at the start of a task, and the original guess stays on the record, marked as what it was.
Questions people ask about this
- Can the AI change a rule I approved?
- It can propose a replacement, and it has to point at the rule it would replace instead of quietly writing a second version. Yours keeps governing until you accept the swap. And if it proposed something and you told it it was wrong, it can withdraw its own proposal — the withdrawal stays on the record, because “it suggested this and backed off” is worth knowing.
- Do I have to review everything for the memory to work?
- No. Recording works from the first day whether or not you ever open the review screen; meanwhile Arroway decides on its own which rules go in front of your AI. Review is how you cut what should not have entered, and it is a list Arroway assembles for you rather than a queue you have to clear — you can leave it a couple of weeks.
- What stops the collection from filling up with near-duplicates?
- Two things, and neither of them is you noticing. Before a new entry is saved, the related ones are shown to whoever is writing, so a second version of a rule that already exists has to be a deliberate act; and a replacement is declared by pointing at what it replaces, never guessed from similar titles. Whatever gets past that lands on the review screen as a collision for a person to settle. Nothing is merged or deleted automatically.
Where this is verifiable
The sanctioned product spec and the curation decisions recorded in the repository, plus the review surface in the product itself. The behaviour described here is what the tools enforce, not a roadmap.
https://www.arroway.app/en/answers/human-sanctioned-ai-memory