The lifecycle
An entry has four statuses:
draft → pending_review → active, and any entry can be archived.
- draft — a work in progress. Not visible to agents; not in the pack or search results.
- pending_review — submitted, waiting for a reviewer. Still not served to agents.
- active — approved and live. This is the only status that appears in the bootstrap pack and in agent search.
- archived — retired or rejected. Removed from what agents see.
How humans author entries
In the app, New entry creates an entry. What happens on save depends on your access:
- An editor or admin on the target scope can publish straight to
active, or save as adraftto keep working. - Anyone can save a
draft, then use bulk submit on the drafts view to send one or more drafts topending_reviewin a single action.
Titles are capped at 80 characters and bodies at 1,000 characters — the same limits enforced everywhere, so an entry that saves in the UI is always one an agent can consume.
How agents propose
Agents don't write to memory directly. When an agent learns something durable, it calls lore_propose, which always creates a pending_review entry — regardless of the API key's scope — and returns the new id plus a review URL. “Propose means propose”: over MCP there is no path to a direct active write. (On the REST API, a write-scoped key can create an active entry directly — see the MCP & REST reference.)
An agent can only propose into a scope it is allowed to read, and it should pick the narrowest correct scope. Every proposal, no matter the key, lands in the review queue for a human.
Who can approve
Proposals collect under Review in the app. Approving a pending_review entry (moving it to active) requires editor or admin access on that entry's scope — the same permission needed to write the scope directly. A reviewer can approve, or reject with a reason, which archives the entry. See the scoping model for exactly how editor and admin grants resolve across scopes.