Briefings and Guidance

The loop starts before the agent does anything. A briefing is the compiled state of what the account knows about the thing the agent is about to touch — not a search over raw entries, but a digest that already says which learning has held up, which has failed, and what has been tried here before. Guidance adds the decision layer: given the actions this agent could take, which one the record recommends. Every other stage of the loop exists to make the next briefing better.

Where briefings come from

SenseLab compiles digests continuously from what agents write, read and commit. Each digest has a type and a scope:

Digest	Scope	What it contains
`entity`	An entity path such as `acme/checkout`	What is known about it: top entries, a narrative, and the evidence sections below
`agent_brief`	One agent	What that agent has learned and done — entries, entities touched, outcomes
`source`	A connector such as GitHub or Slack	What has been ingested from it and which entities it touched
`connection_map`	Across entities	The strongest relationships in the knowledge graph around the scope

Recompilation is gated on drift, so a digest is rebuilt when the knowledge under it has changed, not on a timer. Agents read them with amfs_briefing(entity_path=...) in MCP or mem.briefing(...) in the SDKs; compact=True returns only the lead digest, and since=<timestamp> on a repeat call returns only what changed.

Read the evidence sections first

The lead digest carries the state of the record, not just a summary:

Section	Meaning	What to do
`validated`	Entries every outcome so far has confirmed	Act on these
`discredited`	Entries a failure gated, with `replaced_by` where a later success is known	Avoid these; follow the replacement
`regime_shift`	Entries that were validated repeatedly and have just started failing	Something changed. Verify before reusing anything in the scope
`tried_here`	The actions taken on this entity and how each fared — `resolve:resend_email 6/6`, `resolve:update_payment_method 0/8`	Do not repeat what keeps failing
`hot_context`	The entries most worth reading now, each with an `evidence_status`	An untested 0.9 and a validated 0.9 are different things to act on

The labels come from the evidence model: untested, validated, contested, discredited. A regime shift is an event rather than a state — it is flagged for a week after the latest failure and then clears, so a rule discredited last month does not keep steering today’s runs.

Procedures and the environment

Procedures — entries of type procedure that say how to do a task — are listed in their own section of the briefing. A procedure whose preconditions name a different environment (another model, runtime or agent version) is set apart as procedures_not_applicable, with the failing precondition spelled out, so an agent on Python 3.12 is not handed steps that only work on 3.10. The agent’s environment is read from the session; the SDKs let you pass it explicitly.

Guidance: what to try

When a task ends in a choice among a fixed set of actions — a tool with an action enum, a runbook with numbered fixes — the agent asks for priors on the candidates:

amfs_retrieve(query="customer did not receive the invoice email",
              entity_path="acme/support", include_priors=True,
              candidate_actions=["resolve:resend_email", "resolve:update_payment_method", "resolve:refund"],
              compact=True)

The response ends with action_priors — for each action, how often it won and lost here on similar tasks, who tried it and when — and a recommendation:

Mode	Meaning
`act`	The top hit is validated or an action has a good record here. Take `suggested_action`.
`explore`	Everything tried here has failed, or a regime shift is flagged. Try `suggested_action` first — it is assigned per agent, so peers working the same problem explore different actions instead of the same one.
`escalate`	Every candidate has been tried here and failed. Escalate on the first attempt rather than the third.
`abstain`	Nothing in scope has been tried or validated. The agent is on its own judgement, and knows it.

Declaring a situation — a stable label for the kind of task, never the task text — stores the outcome under that label, so the next run that declares the same one gets priors counted over that situation’s own record. In the Python SDK, Run.begin() wraps this into a single Guidance object with the rendered text to inject, the procedures that apply, the recommendation and a plan — the order to try actions in for the whole run, never including one that already failed here. See Guidance with Run.

Closing the loop from the briefing

Guidance is only as good as what flows back. Three habits keep it sharp:

Name what you acted on. A briefing serves several entries and the agent follows one. Passing causal_entry_keys on the outcome sends the result to that one, instead of charging every entry in the context.
Mark failed attempts. amfs_record_attempt closes the approach the agent just tried, so the entry that misled it receives the failure and only what was read afterwards is credited with the recovery.
Commit the outcome. Without amfs_commit_outcome, the run never reaches the record and the next briefing is no better than this one.

What’s next

Confidence & Evidence

How outcomes move the labels the briefing reads.

Context Graphs

The decision trace an outcome is committed against.

Python SDK

briefing(), retrieve() with priors, and Run.

Behavior

When the record says a fix is needed, not just a different action.

Product

Getting Started

Guides

Self-Hosting

Core Concepts

Pro Features

Briefings and Guidance

Where briefings come from

Read the evidence sections first

Procedures and the environment

Guidance: what to try

Closing the loop from the briefing

What’s next

Confidence & Evidence

Context Graphs

Python SDK

Behavior

​Where briefings come from

​Read the evidence sections first

​Procedures and the environment

​Guidance: what to try

​Closing the loop from the briefing

​What’s next

Confidence & Evidence

Context Graphs

Python SDK

Behavior

Where briefings come from

Read the evidence sections first

Procedures and the environment

Guidance: what to try

Closing the loop from the briefing

What’s next