Then that TOC becomes the "required read" before everything in any new agent. Which increases the memory doc read substantially since it understands what each doc is natively.
The agent in this run did exactly that, natively. It maintained MEMORY.md as a table of contents: one line per note with a name and a short description, and that index was spliced into the system prompt of every session in every memory arm, so each new session started already knowing what every note was about. The note bodies sat one read away.
What happened: sessions opened a note body in 101 of the 1,080 held-out runs that had them, and mounting the index and files moved nothing across nine comparisons. So the required-read TOC pattern was implemented here by the agent itself, and it did not convert into improvement.
That may say more about this setting than about your pattern: every attempt was graded and the whole record was still in context, so the notes had nothing to add that the conversation did not already carry.
The index the agent built is here, with the note bodies beside it: https://github.com/shojin-lab/shorep/blob/main/studies/conve...