The technical overview makes claims about the state of the field, validated strengths, and gaps. This supplement provides the sources behind those claims so readers can evaluate them independently.
Between February and March 2026, we conducted a structured pressure-test of the Living Memory and Alexandria architecture against 20+ external sources spanning academic papers, open-source projects, industry articles, and commercial products. Each source was evaluated in a dedicated document that compares its approach to ours, identifies what we should adopt, and notes where our design diverges.
Not all original source materials are preserved (some were live demos, videos, or paywalled content). Where external links exist, they are included below. Our evaluation documents are available in the project repository under docs/research/.
Claims from the technical overview, mapped to the sources that support or challenge them.
| Claim | Supporting sources | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Propositional framing has no evaluated equivalent | MIE, Cognee, Letta/MemGPT, Hindsight, MAPLE, Memory Survey, CrewAI | MIE stores flat text; Cognee uses triplets; Letta uses filesystem; Hindsight uses embeddings. None render claims with explicit reasoning chains. |
| Memory evolution (decay, condensation, supersession) ahead of the field | Engram, Cognee, Memory Survey, Letta/MemGPT, MAPLE | Engram has decay tiers (closest). Cognee has memify (spaced repetition). Most systems implement formation and retrieval only, not evolution. |
| Forgetting design is the most complete evaluated | Memory Survey, Engram, MAPLE, Letta/MemGPT | Memory Survey places forgetting at the apex of its taxonomy. Engram has partial decay. No evaluated system has our full forgetting pipeline (pruning + supersession + condensation + stale detection). |
| 3D hierarchical token-level memory at the apex of the 2026 survey's taxonomy | Memory in the Age of Agents Survey (Hu et al.) | The survey's taxonomy has six levels; our design maps to the highest. Direct correspondence documented in evaluation. |
| Session lifecycle validated independently | Anthropic Memory Tool, MAPLE, Memory Survey | Anthropic uses context editing + auto-injected prompts. MAPLE uses M/L/P with session boundaries. Survey validates lifecycle as a design pattern. |
| No one is building the full knowledge engineering discipline | All 20+ sources | No evaluated system treats knowledge claims as installed capabilities requiring dependency tracking, impact analysis, capability testing, and deprecation management. This is an absence claim; future sources may disprove it. |
| Memory poisoning amplifies blast radius via propositional framing | Memory Poisoning Threat Model (internal), ATHF | Internal analysis. ATHF's LOCK pattern validates the need for trust boundaries on procedural memory. |
| For simple retrieval, mechanism doesn't matter (Letta 74% on LoCoMo with filesystem) | Letta/MemGPT, Hindsight | Letta's LoCoMo results. Hindsight scores higher (TEMPR) but uses a different benchmark. The point: graph value is in discovery, reasoning, and evolution, not speed. |
Each source was evaluated using a consistent approach:
1. Understand the source on its own terms: what problem does it solve, for whom, with what trade-offs?
2. Map to our architecture: where does it overlap, where does it diverge, where does it address a gap we have?
3. Identify adoptable patterns: what should we take from this source? What's the minimal useful adoption?
4. Pressure-test our assumptions: does this source invalidate or weaken any of our architectural bets?
5. Document honestly: where the source is ahead of us, say so. Where we're ahead, explain why with evidence.
This is not a formal systematic review. Sources were selected based on relevance, availability, and discovery during active research, not from a comprehensive literature search. Some sources were evaluated from blog posts or README files, not from peer-reviewed publications. The evaluation was conducted by a small team and reflects our architectural perspective. We encourage readers to evaluate the original sources independently and draw their own conclusions.