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A memory store that only ever grows gets worse at its job. Superseded beliefs sit alongside the facts that replaced them, entries nobody has read in months compete for space in briefings, and three agents independently record the same finding in slightly different words. Consolidation compacts the store. It is deliberately conservative: the safe operations happen automatically, and anything that changes meaning is proposed for review rather than applied.

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Two tiers

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Tier A — applied automatically

These operations do not change what your memory says, so they run without asking. Note the word demoted. Tier A never deletes. Entries move to the archive tier, which takes them out of everyday recall while leaving them readable and restorable.

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Tier B — proposed for review

These change meaning, so they need a human or an agent to agree. A Tier B candidate is written to a branch named cortex/consolidation/{entity_path}/{timestamp}, with the merged entry on that branch. Your main timeline is untouched until someone merges it.

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Candidates and proposals

The two words mean different things, which matters when reading tool output. A candidate is a detection result computed on the fly and not stored anywhere. A proposal is a candidate that has been persisted as a branch and is waiting for a decision. Review proposals in the dashboard under agent branches, on the Consolidation tab. Each shows the diff between what exists now and what the merge would produce. Approve & Merge applies it through the normal branch merge path; Reject closes the branch and leaves memory as it was.

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When it runs

Tier A runs automatically roughly every six hours. Both tiers also run on demand, from the Memory Distiller panel on the Pro dashboard or from an agent.
Returns counts of consolidation runs, entries auto-archived, proposals pending, and entities ready for consolidation.
Lists proposals awaiting review.
Runs consolidation now: applies Tier A, and records Tier B candidates as proposals.
amfs_consolidate accepts a dry_run argument, but the service currently ignores it and performs a real run either way. To preview without changing anything, read amfs_consolidation_candidates instead. That tool needs an entity path to inspect.
Two neighbouring tools are often confused with consolidation because they also look at the store as a whole. Neither modifies memory. amfs_critique() reports on memory quality — stale, orphaned, uncalibrated, contradictory, and toxic entries. It tells you where consolidation would help. amfs_distill(min_confidence=0.3, max_entries=500) produces a compact bootstrap set: the highest-value slice of memory, suitable for seeding a new agent. It returns that set to you and leaves the store untouched.

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Undoing it

Every consolidation operation is a versioned write, so nothing is lost. A Tier A demotion can be reversed by writing the entry back to a warmer tier; its content and history were never altered. A Tier B proposal you have not merged is discarded by rejecting the branch. One you have already merged is undone the way any merge is — roll back to a tag or timestamp from before it.
Embedding-based semantic merging appears in the codebase but is not wired into the running service. Consolidation today works on the rules described above, not on semantic similarity beyond the string comparison used to spot convergent knowledge.