Never Delete, Supersede: Memory as Evidence for Long-Lived Agents

Abstract

Never Delete, Supersede: Memory as Evidence for Long-Lived Agents. An agent's memory that edits-in-place destroys the very thing a long-lived agent needs most: the record of what it used to believe and when. The working rule — every correction is a strike-through band above the old truth, never a deletion — gives each fresh session a pickup chain it can trust, makes wrong turns teachable instead of invisible, and turns the memory itself into evidence. Part of a series; it cites the companion campaign paper (Melikoğlu, Altınbaş & Tanrıöver, 2026; concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22086013) and the related Ghost Debt report. Bilingual: the full text is included in both English and Turkish. AI-transparency note: the draft was written by an AI agent under human direction (the human authors held go/no-go authority), blind cross-family jury-reviewed (producing model family excluded from the bench), and reviewed against the source ledgers by the human authors before publication.