HeartBeatAgents

Advanced Configuration

View as Markdown

Tuning standing orders and memory decay once the defaults aren't quite right for your use case.

Most agents work well with default settings covered in First Setup and Configuration. This page covers the knobs worth reaching for once you've outgrown the defaults.

Standing orders: structure, not just a prompt

Standing orders are more than a single system prompt string. Structure them explicitly into:

  • Role definition: who the agent is and what it's responsible for.
  • Behavioral rules: tone, escalation thresholds, what it should never do.
  • Knowledge boundaries: what it should say when it doesn't know something, rather than guessing.
  • Escalation policy: when to hand off to a human or another agent.
  • Operational limits: rate limits, spend caps, or scope restrictions on tool use.

Every change is versioned (see Agent Management), so iterate on structure incrementally and roll back if a change regresses behavior.

Memory tuning

HeartBeatAgents' three memory types (episodic, semantic, procedural; see Memory) use a few tunable parameters:

  • Importance scoring: memories are scored 0.0–1.0 based on emotional significance, decision impact, and recurrence frequency.
  • Decay rate: memories decay at a configurable rate, defaulting to 0.995/day, to prevent memory bloat. Lowering the decay rate makes an agent's memory more persistent; raising it makes older context fade faster.
  • Cross-agent sharing: memory can be scoped to a single agent, or shared at the team/organization level.

When to adjust these

  • An agent forgetting things too quickly → lower the decay rate rather than rewriting standing orders to compensate.
  • An agent behaving inconsistently across similar requests → check whether standing orders' behavioral rules are specific enough.
  • Multiple agents that should share context → enable cross-agent memory sharing rather than duplicating knowledge into each agent's standing orders.
  • Agent Management: versioning and rollback for the changes described here
  • Memory: the underlying memory architecture these settings tune