Context drift is the quiet killer of long AI conversations. A Redditor in r/PromptEngineering shared a structured prompt system called the INTERNAL MEMORY CARD that gives your AI explicit rules for what to remember, what to update, and what to throw away: so it stays coherent from message 5 to message 55.
What the Memory Card Actually Is
Long conversations fall apart. You’ve had a 40-message session with an AI and somewhere around message 30, it starts contradicting earlier decisions or forgetting constraints you already established. The original poster, working in Portuguese, built a system prompt protocol to fix that.
The idea is straightforward. You embed a set of rules into your prompt that tells the AI how to maintain a compressed, key-value memory log throughout the conversation. The output looks like this:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ LIST MEMORY CARD ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ current_task: writing blog post user_pref: short paragraphs, English only status: drafting section 2 constraints: max 1000 words
Clean. Scannable. Self-updating. Each key gets overwritten when the state changes. Completed items get dropped. Nothing carries dead weight.
How the Retention Rules Work
The prompt defines what the AI should keep in the memory log:
- 🗂 The current task objective
- Explicit user preferences and constraints
- Decisions already made
- Current process state
- Contextual facts that are still valid
The update triggers are equally specific: new relevant info, state changes, new constraints, corrections of previous info. Not every message triggers an update. Only what actually changes the picture.
The discard rules handle the rest. Completed temporary info gets removed. Obsolete data gets deleted. Old keys get overwritten. No duplicates, ever.
Why This Works When “Remember This” Doesn’t
LLMs don’t prioritize recent context the way humans do. Everything in the context window carries weight: but older tokens from early in the conversation can still pull the model’s outputs. The further you go, the more your initial framing competes with your current instructions.
“Remember this” instructions just add more tokens. The memory card forces structured state management instead. You define the protocol explicitly rather than hoping the model tracks what matters on its own. It’s the same principle good engineers use when managing application state: define what persists, what changes, and what gets cleaned up.
The efficiency rules make it practical. Each value stays under 8-12 words. No explanations, no justifications, no redundancies. The card stays small and useful rather than ballooning into another wall of text the model has to process.
💡 Use Cases
This prompt earns its keep in any extended work session:
- Long debugging or code review conversations with shifting requirements
- Multi-step content planning where priorities evolve
- Complex research sessions with many constraints and sources
- Structured creative writing with lots of variables to track
- Any workflow where you’ve caught the AI contradicting its own earlier outputs
If your typical session runs more than 15-20 messages, this is worth having in your toolkit.
Prompt of the Day
Here’s the full prompt exactly as the original poster shared it. It’s written in Portuguese, but works with any model in any language: just paste it into your system prompt or at the start of a new conversation.
[INTERNAL MEMORY CARD]
Objetivo:
Manter um resumo comprimido, claro e atualizado do contexto atual.
Função:
Registrar apenas informações relevantes para continuidade,
coerência e decisões futuras da interação.
Critérios de retenção:
Manter somente informações que se enquadrem em pelo menos uma das categorias:
- objetivo atual da tarefa
- preferências do usuário
- restrições, limites ou condições
- decisões já tomadas
- estado atual do processo
- fatos contextuais ainda válidos
Critérios de atualização:
Atualizar apenas quando ocorrer pelo menos uma das situações:
- nova informação relevante
- mudança de estado
- mudança de objetivo
- nova restrição
- correção de informação anterior
Critérios de descarte:
- remover informações temporárias já concluídas
- excluir dados obsoletos ou inválidos
- sobrescrever chaves antigas quando o estado mudar
- não manter duplicidades
Regras de eficiência:
- usar frases extremamente curtas
- máximo de 8 a 12 palavras por valor
- remover redundâncias
- não repetir informações já registradas
- manter apenas o contexto necessário
Regras de estilo:
- tom neutro, técnico e informativo
- sem explicações longas
- sem justificativas
- descrever fatos, estados ou decisões
- preferir estruturas nominais curtas
Formato obrigatório:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
LIST MEMORY CARD
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
{chave}:{valor conciso}
Diretrizes de formato:
- chaves curtas e sem espaços
- usar nomes semânticos e consistentes
- um item por linha
- sobrescrever a chave anterior quando necessário
- manter apenas contexto útil para próximas decisões
Try it at the start of your next long working session. Check whether turn 40 feels as focused as turn 5. If you want to see how others are adapting it, the original discussion is up in r/PromptEngineering.
Prompt: INTERNAL MEMORY CARD
by u/Ornery-Dark-5844 in PromptEngineering