One person's instance works something out. The question is how that becomes something everyone's instance applies - without it happening by accident.
Promotion is that step, and it's gated.
What promotion does
Promoting a memory shares it from the workspace it lives in into another workspace you belong to. The memory appears in the target, but the target's instances do not apply it - it's excluded from recall there - until an owner of that workspace approves it.
So team memory is deliberate by construction. Nothing half-formed leaks into the shared brain because someone's session was feeling confident.
You have to be a member of both workspaces. A memory can't be promoted into the workspace it already lives in. A brand-new account starts with a single (personal) workspace, so create or join a second one - a team workspace - before you can promote into it.
Promoting
"That gRPC retry gotcha is worth the whole team knowing - promote it to the Acme workspace."
Or from the memory's page in the app, or:
kythe promote <memory-id> <target-space>Every human owner of the target workspace gets an item in their inbox saying a memory is waiting on them. It's a direct ask of a named group, so it doesn't sit unnoticed in a feed.
Approving
An owner opens it, reads it, and approves or rejects. On approval the memory joins the target's recall and every connected instance in that workspace starts recalling it - and citing it - from the next session.
That's the mechanic behind the claim that what your team's AI applies is what your team agreed. The gate is the product.
What to promote
Promote sparingly. The test is whether an instance working somewhere else in the workspace would do the wrong thing without it.
Good candidates:
- a decision with consequences beyond one project,
- a gotcha that has now bitten two people,
- a convention you want written the same way everywhere,
- the runbook everyone needs at 2am.
Leave in per-project memory: working notes, findings still being confirmed, anything project-specific. Per-project memory should carry most of the volume - it's the low-stakes space where being wrong costs nothing much.
Keeping team memory true
Promoted memory ages like any other. Supersede it with the same title, or deprecate it when it stops being right - see Memory. A stale memory that the whole team's instances apply is the most expensive kind, so it's worth someone owning that hygiene.
Undoing it
A promotion can be reversed from the memory's page - it stops being shared into the target workspace. The original is untouched; it only ever lived in one place and was mapped into the other.