Plan Pointers and Record-Directive Form in Budgeted Verification of Inherited Agent Memory

Abstract:An agent that inherits six one-line memories may pull at most one archived source record before acting; a directive written into the store can steer that choice: a pointer to the record, a criterion that identifies it, or both. Across twelve registered studies on one instrument lineage (14,760 attempts) we measured where the request goes under each form. On six direct-provider models a length-matched criterion exceeded a bare id by +35.0 points [+31.2, +38.8] (Study D); the contrast failed its registered superiority rule on a nine-model OpenRouter-served panel (Study E). Appending the id cancelled the criterion on three Claude models (Opus 5: 40/40 to 0/40; Study F-x); six byte-matched edits gave each exact string its own effect (Study G), and a re-run at eighty runs per cell left fifteen of thirty replication contrasts within the margin, fifteen unresolved and none beyond (Study G'). A ratification line (+96.0 points on Opus 5) and a budget of two credits restored the target on all three (Study J); across five criterion strings the suffix's cancellation held for four of the five wordings on Opus 5 and all five wordings on Fable 5.1 (Study H2); in a second store every model followed the criterion (Study H1). Continued into a decision, the criterion moved the choice toward the current record (+100.0 points, Opus 5) and away from it on Fable 5.1 (Study I). A one-character plan pointer's effect (+78.0 points; Study B, after a correction of its first repository report) returned the same verdict under a prospectively registered re-run (+81.7 points; Study B'). All results are descriptive effects of exact edits on fixed panels with registered intervals and no mechanism claim.

46 pages, 7 figures, 35 tables. Twelve registered studies (14,760 attempted episodes) on one instrument lineage; every package was frozen, timestamped and externally deposited before its first confirmatory call. Manuscript, LaTeX source, all episode files, frozen packages, analyzers and the generator of every number are archived at Zenodo: doi:https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22267221

Information Retrieval (cs.IR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.03450 [cs.IR]

(or arXiv:2609.03450v1 [cs.IR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.03450 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)