Memory & Context
23 posts · showing 1–10
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Your Support Agent Still Remembers the Customer Who Was Furious in March. Decide What Memory Expires Before You Decide What It Stores.
Cross-session memory fails less often from forgetting than from remembering too long. A four-class expiry scheme for support agents, and the one field every stored memory needs.
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The On-Call Agent Restarted the Primary Anyway. The Instruction Not To Had Been Summarised Away.
Context compaction keeps the story of a long session and quietly drops the rules. The fix is a pinned constraint block that the summariser is never allowed to touch, plus a check that proves it survived.
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Your Assistant Still Thinks You're Vegetarian Because of One Dinner Party. Build the Memory Write Gate Before the Retriever.
Most agent memory bugs are write bugs: a one-off remark gets stored as a permanent fact, and no retriever can fix what should never have been saved. Here is a four-question gate that decides what goes in, with scope, provenance and an expiry on every entry.
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Summarising the Conversation Threw Away the One ID the Next Tool Call Needed. Summarise Prose, Never Identifiers.
Context compaction reads fine to a human and breaks the agent anyway: the summary kept the story and lost the order number. The fix is to stop asking a summariser to carry identifiers at all.
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When the Context Window Fills, Cut in This Order — and Leave a Stub Behind
Most agents evict context by dropping the oldest tokens, which reliably deletes the nine words that mattered while keeping a 4,000-token HTML dump nobody needs. Here is the order to cut in, and why every eviction should leave a stub behind.
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Append or Supersede? What to Do When New Information Contradicts Agent Memory
Most agent memory systems only know how to add. The moment a fact changes, the store holds both versions and the retriever picks whichever one scores higher — which is why a scheduling agent keeps booking a room that was decommissioned last month.
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Your Retriever Returned 12 Chunks. The Agent Only Really Read 3 of Them.
The correct passage was in the prompt and the agent wrote around it anyway. That's not a retrieval bug — it's a placement bug, and there's a one-minute test that tells the two apart before you touch your embeddings.
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What Should Your Agent Forget? Give Every Memory an Expiry Rule
Agent memory systems have a write verb and a recall verb, but no verb for "stop believing this." Here's how to decide at write time what makes each memory stop being true — and why expiry should downgrade a fact rather than delete it.
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When Memory Contradicts the Tool Call, Which One Does the Agent Believe?
An agent had the live billing data and a three-week-old memory in the same context window, and answered from the memory. The reason isn't retrieval — it's how prompts are assembled, and there are three specific fixes.
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Should Your Agent Remember That, or Just Look It Up Again?
Two questions sort every fact an agent encounters into "write it down" or "fetch it fresh" — and getting the sort wrong is how an assistant ends up confidently quoting a meeting that moved last week.