Offload one closed topic to the shelf as a durable, indexed episode — redaction, digest contract and git commit included. Derived files are not written here — they are rendered by memshelf_rebuild or the shelf's bot. Details: docs/tools.md.

Check a digest against the contract while it is still being written — the same validator memshelf_shelve runs, writing nothing. strict turns warnings into failures.

Fetch a shelved episode by id, or one ## Section of it, as a data envelope. Prefer the section when it answers the question.

Return the shelf INDEX — the small recall entry point. Read it before answering anything about past work, then recall only what you need.

Grep the shelf for episodes matching every query token; returns addresses and snippets. Use when the episode id is unknown.

Report the shelf's token economy: standing cost vs shelved mass, claimed compression, realized savings from logged recalls.

Report what your context window is made of and what you could put down — breakdown plus ranked proposals; writes nothing. Pass your window's occupants (label, size, live or not); with none it reports the shelf alone.

Create (or top up) a memory shelf: layout, categories, INDEX preamble, POLICY.md, shelf.yml. Idempotent; never overwrites existing files.

Regenerate the derived files (ledger.tsv, .meta.json, INDEX.md, stats.svg) from the episodes; check=true only reports drift. Hand-run it only on a shelf whose bot is not rendering.

Archive a period's episodes behind one digest-of-digests you write, shrinking INDEX; nothing is deleted. Not the answer to index-bloat.

Drop episodes past retain_until, then reindex. Dry run unless apply=true; removes working-tree files only, git history keeps them.

Settle the two-writers-on-parallel-branches conflict: union derived rows, rebuild INDEX, run doctor. Episode conflicts are reported, never auto-merged; safe outside a conflict too.

Diagnose shelf integrity: episode schema, digest contract at rest, leaked secrets, ledger consistency, INDEX budget. Read-only; fixes nothing. check_remote adds the network probe for a public remote.

Retro-shelve an exported dialog without pulling it through context: discover lists conversations by content markers, extract writes one cleaned conversation to a working file for segmenting and shelving.