— Cardinal · How memory works
What does Cardinal remember?
In this article
Overview
Cardinal builds a private knowledge graph from your conversations as you go. Not a transcript, not a vector dump — an explicit graph of entities, relationships, and context. Yours, exportable, deletable.
The substrate is what makes Cardinal feel like it knows you. It's also what makes it different from a chat session that resets every time you close the tab.
What gets stored
- Entities — people, projects, companies, concepts you bring up
- Relationships — how those entities connect (works at, founded by, depends on)
- Stable preferences — when you say "I prefer X over Y", that gets remembered
- Recurring contexts — projects you return to, recurring decisions
- Explicit asks to remember — when you say "remember that…", Cardinal stores it as a high-weight node
What does not get stored
- Raw conversation transcripts — those expire after 90 days
- One-off facts mentioned in passing without context
- Anything you explicitly ask Cardinal not to remember
- Health, financial, or legal specifics unless you opt in to those classes of memory in settings
Shaping the substrate
You can edit, weight, or remove individual nodes any time. Settings → Substrate shows the full graph. Search by entity, time range, or topic. Click a node to see what Cardinal knows and where it learned it. Click forget this to delete the node and any edges that depend on it.
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