On the general premise, I agree. But I don't think that moment is today, not yet anyway. I don't think we understand the right way to approach context and memory yet or how long they should last for, never mind standardizing on an abstraction prematurely that ends up being like SOAP or SGML.
I think It needs to be as diverse as people .. If agents are to become our constant "muse" like companions, I want the wiring of the brain of mine to be as wired as possible.. Why not juggling chain saws in orbit.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio&t=17s
The need for a unified format or spec is greatly reduced in the case of Agent memory because by definition it is read by agents, and agents are already instructed / programmed to read memory files of different formats. Even if such instructions did not exist, agents are extremely good at traversing files to get the necessary context it needs.
This is true and it probably is actually fine, but in a way you don't want it to be wasting its reasoning abilities and context window on figuring out which text files to read.
It would be like trying to accomplish something as a human but all your reference material is always in a different format, it would be maddening.
> Agent memory because by definition it is read by agents, and agents are already instructed / programmed to read memory files of different formats.
Only it's not read by agents, and largely ignored.
From Anthropic's recent self-congratulatory article:
---start quote ---
Injected memories use up valuable tokens, and an incorrect note can be carried into every session. Loading a note also doesn’t guarantee that Claude acts on it: our documentation on Claude Code warns that longer instruction files reduce adherence
...
It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md
at this point i'm pretty convinced agent memory is strictly harmful. it remembers the wrong things, and then turns them into an inane focus for each task. i disable it universally on every harness. if i want memory, i specifically instruct the agent to record findings into a file.
Same. Everybody builds one, and then eventually realizes it makes the model stupid and confused. The right solution is pretty much always developer documentation in the repo, in roughly the same shape you'd make developer docs for humans that you want to be able to get up to speed about your codebase really quickly.
This has the benefit of being something you can easily read over every now and then to make sure the model hasn't baked in some random comment you made about a specific circumstance a month ago and made a weird religion out of it.
Not trying to be disingenuous but what's wrong with just a normal filesystem?
The best version of memory I've experienced is when I give my agent a memory directory and just let it do what it wants in there, with minimal rules on my end.
On the general premise, I agree. But I don't think that moment is today, not yet anyway. I don't think we understand the right way to approach context and memory yet or how long they should last for, never mind standardizing on an abstraction prematurely that ends up being like SOAP or SGML.
I think It needs to be as diverse as people .. If agents are to become our constant "muse" like companions, I want the wiring of the brain of mine to be as wired as possible.. Why not juggling chain saws in orbit.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcJSW7Rprio&t=17s
The need for a unified format or spec is greatly reduced in the case of Agent memory because by definition it is read by agents, and agents are already instructed / programmed to read memory files of different formats. Even if such instructions did not exist, agents are extremely good at traversing files to get the necessary context it needs.
This is true and it probably is actually fine, but in a way you don't want it to be wasting its reasoning abilities and context window on figuring out which text files to read.
It would be like trying to accomplish something as a human but all your reference material is always in a different format, it would be maddening.
> Agent memory because by definition it is read by agents, and agents are already instructed / programmed to read memory files of different formats.
Only it's not read by agents, and largely ignored.
From Anthropic's recent self-congratulatory article:
---start quote ---
Injected memories use up valuable tokens, and an incorrect note can be carried into every session. Loading a note also doesn’t guarantee that Claude acts on it: our documentation on Claude Code warns that longer instruction files reduce adherence
...
It loads only the first 200 lines or 25 KB of MEMORY.md
https://www.anthropic.com/research/components-of-agent-memor...
--- end quote ---
Well, coding agents are smart, they can use all kinds of memory. A simple skill on how and when to access it is enough...
at this point i'm pretty convinced agent memory is strictly harmful. it remembers the wrong things, and then turns them into an inane focus for each task. i disable it universally on every harness. if i want memory, i specifically instruct the agent to record findings into a file.
Same. Everybody builds one, and then eventually realizes it makes the model stupid and confused. The right solution is pretty much always developer documentation in the repo, in roughly the same shape you'd make developer docs for humans that you want to be able to get up to speed about your codebase really quickly.
This has the benefit of being something you can easily read over every now and then to make sure the model hasn't baked in some random comment you made about a specific circumstance a month ago and made a weird religion out of it.
Not trying to be disingenuous but what's wrong with just a normal filesystem?
The best version of memory I've experienced is when I give my agent a memory directory and just let it do what it wants in there, with minimal rules on my end.
Files aren’t indexed and vectorised by default
So we need another complicated format to store information so that the machines which read unstructured text can work with it?
it's called a markdown file
I decided long ago to not wait for you all to figure this out.
Index it all. Embed it all. Give your agents the ability to query it all. Eval different configurations to figure out what works best for you.