People and memory

Pepper keeps a short record of the people in the chats you connect: who they are, what's open with them, and a few useful facts.

Everyone who writes to you in a connected chat gets a record in Pepper, under the name their app shows. Pepper ranks people by how often they wrote in the last 30 days.

On top of that, while reading chats for follow-ups, Pepper may notice a lasting fact about someone, like a role, where they're based, or a preference. "Mira Chen: based in Lisbon." Each fact is checked twice before it counts:

1. The quote it rests on must appear in the message, ignoring capitals and spacing.
2. A second, separate model check reads the messages behind the fact and confirms they state it plainly or clearly imply it.

What happens next depends on who wrote it:

• A fact from your own words is kept right away. On the dashboard's People tab it's labelled You said.
• A possible fact from someone else's words waits in Review, the dashboard tab where you keep or reject what Pepper found. Choose Keep and it's labelled You confirmed. Choose Wrong and Pepper rejects it; the record of your correction stays.

Facts expire after 180 days, so Pepper doesn't keep treating old details as true.

Pepper will not learn any of these about another person from what someone else wrote:

• health, illness, pregnancy, therapy or disability,
• sexuality or gender identity,
• religion or politics,
• money: salary, income, debt, loans,
• relationships: dating, breakups, divorce, affairs,
• immigration status or criminal history.

These are blocked in code, not just by asking the AI model: a list of English words is matched against the fact's wording, so other wording can slip past it. The only way one of them is stored on purpose is if you wrote it yourself. To keep it out entirely, don't mention it in the chats you connect.

A VIP is someone whose items Pepper puts first. VIPs get a ★ in briefs and on the dashboard, rank higher in Needs you (the list of what you owe), and have a separate count in the brief's unread backlog.

You choose your VIPs in Telegram:

/vip Dana Reyes
/unvip Dana Reyes
/people

/people lists the 25 people you hear from most, with VIPs first and an id under each name. If what you type matches several people with different names, Pepper lists them and asks you to use the id. The same name on two chat apps is treated as one person: /vip sets both, and the dashboard shows one card, though /people lists each account.

On the dashboard, the People tab has two parts.

VIPs get a card each:

• when they last wrote, and on which network,
• the first thing you owe them, and the first thing they owe you,
• one fact Pepper holds about them, labelled You said or You confirmed.

Everyone else lists up to eight other people who wrote in the last 30 days, with their message count and how many items are open with them.

Each person is shown as a tile with their initials, like DR for Dana Reyes. Phone numbers and unknown senders get #. Pepper doesn't fetch or show contact photos.

Pepper also keeps three small text files in the memory folder inside its data folder (data/ in the Pepper folder, unless PEPPER_DATA_DIR says otherwise). They're loaded into every conversation you have with Pepper and sent to Anthropic as part of it:

You can edit them with any text editor on the Mac that runs Pepper. Anything past the limit is left out, and a note saying so takes its place. The file itself is not changed. A change takes effect in your next conversation, or right away if you start a new one with /new.

• A possible fact that's wrong: choose Wrong in Review, as above.
• A follow-up filed under the wrong person: mark it Not a task. For a task you set yourself, reply to the message where Pepper confirmed it, or to /tasks, with the item's number and the fix, like 2 is about Sam Lee. This doesn't work as a reply to a brief.
• A saved fact: there's no edit button yet. To remove it, see Forgetting someone.
• Something about you or how Pepper should treat someone: write it in MEMORY.md.

/forget removes a person from Pepper.

/forget Lena Park

Pepper first shows what it would delete and asks you to confirm with Forget permanently or Cancel. Nothing happens until you tap. It deletes:

• their messages, and your whole one-to-one chat with them,
• follow-ups, facts and decisions about them or built on their messages,
• your conversations with Pepper and the text of briefs that contain the name you typed,
• their name in meeting transcripts and attendee lists.

Pepper then stops importing messages from that person, so the next sync doesn't bring them back. What stays: other people's messages in group chats that mention them, what they said in group meetings (with the name replaced), and anything you wrote about them in your memory files. Type the name the way it appears in Pepper, since conversations and briefs are matched against what you type. Deleted text is overwritten in the database rather than just marked as deleted, though copies may still exist elsewhere on disk.

More on where your data lives in How Pepper keeps your data safe.