HERC's diary¶

HERC keeps a short notebook for each specialist, and every durable thing it learns about your organisation's data becomes one line that specialist reads before it answers — so it grows more fluent in your data over time.

This is HERC's long-term memory: private to your organisation, curated by the specialists themselves, and surfaced back into every answer they give.

Specialists with a diary5 · glossary · catalog · data products · metrics · flows

Entry length1024 chars max

Written byAgents only

ScopePer organisation · private

When the diary helps you¶

Glossary that speaks your dialect

After a few weeks the glossary specialist stops asking you to clarify domain-specific terms — it remembers what your team means.
Catalog by your team's name

The catalog specialist suggests the right table by the name your team uses for it, not the raw database name.
Metrics the way you measure

The metric specialist proposes definitions that match how your team actually measures things.
House conventions, remembered

The data products and flows specialists pick up your conventions for naming and ownership.

How the diary works¶

Ask a specialist a question and HERC reads that specialist's notebook first. It answers, and if it just learned something durable about your data, it writes one line back. The next question reads the note again — so each specialist compounds what it knows about your organisation, and everyone benefits from what any one conversation taught.

flowchart LR
    ASK["Someone in your<br/>organisation asks<br/>a specialist"] --> READ["HERC reads that<br/>specialist's notebook<br/>newest-first"]
    READ --> ANSWER["Specialist answers,<br/>more fluent in<br/>your data"]
    ANSWER --> LEARN{"Learned something<br/>durable?"}
    LEARN -->|"no"| DONE(["Nothing written"])
    LEARN -->|"yes"| WRITE["Write one line to<br/>the notebook<br/>(secrets stripped)"]
    WRITE --> NOTE[("Specialist's notebook<br/>≤ 1024 chars per line")]
    NOTE -.->|"read first next time"| READ
    classDef accent fill:#ff8400,stroke:#e67700,color:#ffffff,font-weight:600;
    class WRITE accent

Figure 1 — The learning loop. Each specialist reads its own notebook before answering and appends a single durable line after learning; over weeks the loop makes it more fluent in your data.

Why teams reach for this

Nobody has to hand-maintain a glossary of house terms for the AI. The specialists learn your organisation's language as you use them, the notes persist across every session and user, and what one teammate's conversation taught becomes something the whole organisation's next question benefits from.

What HERC writes — and what it never does¶

HERC self-curates. It only records short lessons it judges durable, and it deliberately leaves several kinds of content out.

Rule	Detail
Writes	Short, durable lessons about your data and how your team talks about it.
Never writes — secrets	Anything containing tokens, passwords, API keys, or secrets is stripped before the entry is saved.
Never writes — personal	Per-user preferences stay in your personal conversation history, not the org-wide diary.
Never writes — redundant	One-off facts that are already in the catalog.
Length cap	Each entry is capped at 1024 characters.

Why there's no 'add entry' button

Only HERC's specialist agents write to the diary — never a person. There is intentionally no "add diary entry" form anywhere in the platform, so the notebook can only ever contain what a specialist itself judged worth remembering.

The life of an entry¶

An entry is written once, read at the start of every one of that specialist's turns, and eventually folded into a running summary so the notebook stays small. Old lessons are kept — the noise is dropped.

flowchart LR
    NEW["New entry<br/>durable lesson"] --> ACTIVE[("Active notebook<br/>~50 fresh entries<br/>per specialist")]
    ACTIVE --> TURN["Read at the start of<br/>every specialist turn"]
    ACTIVE -.->|"after 30 days<br/>Sunday night"| FOLD["Folded into one<br/>summary per specialist"]
    FOLD --> ACTIVE
    ACTIVE -.->|"admin archives"| ARCHIVED[("Archived<br/>hidden by default")]
    ARCHIVED -.->|"restore"| ACTIVE
    ARCHIVED -.->|"permanent delete"| GONE(["Permanently removed"])
    classDef accent fill:#ff8400,stroke:#e67700,color:#ffffff,font-weight:600;
    class FOLD accent

Figure 2 — The life of an entry. After 30 days HERC quietly folds older lessons into one summary per specialist (for example: "Older lessons: Finance owns metric_revenue_eur. The 'marketing' tag spans Sales and Marketing.") so the diary stays at roughly 50 fresh entries plus the distilled summary.

The folding happens automatically every Sunday night — you don't need to trigger anything.

Reading the diary¶

Everything HERC has written is visible in the admin viewer.

In the viewer	What you see
Where	Administration → Agent diary
Order	Newest entries first
Columns	The authoring specialist (the agent column), when it was written, and the lesson
Filter	By agent, to focus on one specialist
Detail	Click a row to read the full text

Removing an entry¶

Removing an entry happens in two safe steps. Click the trash icon on any row and confirm to archive it: the entry drops out of the viewer's default list and the affected specialist stops reading it on its next run, while HERC keeps every other entry untouched. Archiving is reversible — an archived entry can be restored at any time, which makes it active again so the specialist reads it once more. Archived entries are hidden by default, but the viewer can be asked to include them.

Only after an entry has been archived can it be permanently deleted — a separate, irreversible step that removes it for good. You cannot permanently delete an active entry; it has to be archived first.

Removal is two steps — reversible by default

Archiving is undoable: a removed entry can be restored at any time. Only the separate permanent-delete step is irreversible, and it becomes available only once an entry has already been archived. So a normal removal can always be undone.

Who can read, write, and delete¶

Who	Can
HERC's specialist agents	Read their own notebook at the start of every turn, and write new lessons. They cannot delete.
Administrator / AI Editor	View entries, archive and restore them, and permanently delete an already-archived entry — all via the admin viewer.
Anyone else who can view the diary	View entries in the admin viewer. The row menu to archive, restore or delete is not shown to them, and the server refuses those actions.
Everyone else	Nothing — the diary is private to your organisation and is never shared across tenants.

Limitations (today)¶

Limit	Detail
Only five specialists keep diaries today	glossary, catalog, data products, metrics, flows. The others (tasks, workflows, health, …) do not yet — they will be added in a follow-up.
Read by recency, not relevance	A note HERC wrote six months ago that relates to your question only by paraphrase may not surface. Semantic search is planned for a later release.
Chat UI doesn't announce writes	The chat does not yet tell you "HERC just wrote a diary entry"; writes are visible only in the admin viewer above.

Troubleshooting¶

Symptom	Likely cause	Fix
Diary is empty after weeks of usage	The diary fills slowly on purpose — HERC only writes lessons it judges durable.	Ask a specialist a few specific organisation-shaped questions and check back in a day.
HERC keeps repeating a wrong assumption	A stale or incorrect entry is being read each turn.	Open the admin viewer, find the offending entry, delete it; the next session of that specialist will not have it.
Sensitive content appeared in an entry	A secret slipped past the strip patterns.	Delete it from the admin viewer and report it to your account contact; we will review and tighten the secret-strip patterns.
A specific agent isn't writing	It is not one of the five opt-in specialists.	Confirm it is glossary, catalog, data products, metrics, or flows; the other seven are deferred for v1.