A good human reviewer knows the codebase. inline builds that knowledge automatically: after each substantive review it distills what it learned into a small, durable repo profile, and it re-reads that profile at the start of every future review.
Memory captures implicit knowledge inline discovered on its own — how this codebase is shaped and where it’s dangerous. Learnings, by contrast, capture explicit rules a human taught it. The two are separate on purpose.
The profile is Markdown with exactly four sections:
markdown
## ArchitectureHow the system is laid out; the major modules and how they relate.## ConventionsPatterns this codebase follows that a reviewer should respect.## Fragile areasCode that breaks in non-obvious ways; where to tread carefully.## GotchasSurprises — footguns, implicit contracts, historical scar tissue.
It stays small on purpose — capped at a few thousand characters. It holds only durable knowledge: no PR-specific facts, no generic best practices that apply to any codebase. If it wouldn’t help review the next PR, it doesn’t belong.
Absorb (incremental). After each substantive review, a cheap model call folds that review’s summary, posted findings, and changed paths into the existing profile. The inputs are tokens already paid for during the review, so absorbing is nearly free. This runs best-effort at the end of the pipeline — if it fails, the review is unaffected.
Rebuild (full). The portal’s Regenerate button rebuilds the profile from scratch off the repo’s most recent substantive reviews.
Each profile tracks how many reviews it has absorbed, its cumulative cost, and when it was last updated. A profile can be hand-edited in the portal; once a human edits it, that’s recorded so you know it’s no longer purely agent-maintained.
The profile is injected into the review under a Codebase profile heading, alongside the diff rather than in the cached system prefix — so it can change per review without busting the prompt cache. The deep-review agent reads it before it starts reasoning about the diff, so it arrives already knowing the terrain.