#memory
Every post tagged "memory".
27 posts · showing 11–20
-
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.
-
Was It Retrieval or Reasoning? Diagnosing a Wrong Answer
A day spent rewriting the prompt for a wrong policy answer, when the policy document was never retrieved. Three checks in the right order, and one log field that separates "ignored it" from "never saw it."
-
Budgeting the Context Window: Dividing a Fixed Space
The window wasn't full and the constraints still vanished — because six claimants compete for one space and nobody allocated it. Making history the residual rather than a claimant is what makes the scheme work.
-
Context Engineering Is the Job Now
Not prompt writing — that's the visible part and the small one. The work is deciding what reaches the model, in what form, at what moment, and it's where most agent failures start.
-
Longer Context Windows Won't Fix Long-Horizon Tasks
The premise is right — things fall out of context — and the conclusion doesn't follow. Most long-run failures aren't about storage, and a bigger window removes the discipline that was helping.
-
One Query Is Rarely Enough: Iterative Retrieval for Agents
The search wasn't broken — it answered the question as typed, which isn't the question that was asked. Making retrieval a tool the agent calls repeatedly needs one signal most retrievers refuse to give.
-
The Sales-Research Agent and the Problem of Stale Facts
Every fact in the brief had been true. None was labelled with when — so someone opened a call congratulating a person on a role they'd left a year ago.
-
When Memory Makes an Agent Worse
Every retrieved memory is content injected into the context, relevant or not. Three ways that degrades the agent — including the one where it argues with a user about their own stated preference.
-
Give the Agent a Scratchpad: External Working Memory
Three small tools stop the context from being the only place findings can live. Compaction stops being lossy, long runs stop growing, and you get a readable record instead of a forty-turn transcript.
-
Multi-Tenancy for Agent Products: The Boundaries That Must Hold
Data, memory, context, and capacity — four boundaries, and two of them are agent-specific enough that no existing multi-tenancy checklist mentions them. Few-shot examples harvested from production are a leak.