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Agent memory as a file format

calpaterson.com

61–70 of 114 posts

Re: Agent memory as a file format

#61
All of this stuff seems like a band-aid solution. These things need to be trained ground-up to maintain and update persistent memory (maybe outside the context window?).

Also seems like a requirement for any sort of continual learning capabilities as well.

Re: Agent memory as a file format

#62
post #61

All of this stuff seems like a band-aid solution. These things need to be trained ground-up to maintain and update persistent memory (maybe outside the context window?). Also seems like a requirement for any sort of continual learning capabilities as well.

Memory is not necessarily a good thing. What we need is a combination of sufficiently large context windows (10-100 million tokens) along with curate, bloat-free data.

Re: Agent memory as a file format

#63
I think eventually you need some kind of system that ranks pieces of data based on how useful they are.

I.e. for the web we did that with link count etc.

We need some other mechanism for judging and ranking pieces of "memory" for "agents"

Re: Agent memory as a file format

#64

I think eventually you need some kind of system that ranks pieces of data based on how useful they are. I.e. for the web we did that with link count etc. We need some other mechanism for judging and ranking pieces of "memory" for "agents"

Attention is all you need.

Seriously, isn’t this the core premise of RAG / modern embedding search systems?

Re: Agent memory as a file format

#66

I think eventually you need some kind of system that ranks pieces of data based on how useful they are. I.e. for the web we did that with link count etc. We need some other mechanism for judging and ranking pieces of "memory" for "agents"

You can kludge it together by having the agent keep a log of what it does with any notes and lessons about friction / efficiency, and then on some interval review that + session history for items worth promoting into a topic-based memory, or for things that are needed constantly into the main AGENTS.md or a separate MEMORY.md that's loaded into every session. Reviewing the notes at the same time as session history helps provide enough context to make directionally correct decisions about what is worth keeping in context for future sessions.

Re: Agent memory as a file format

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents have to decide to search files, and they don't always know that they should. For example, if the agent sees the database, it may miss detailed instructions on how to access the database deeper in the repo. Behaviorally, humans want to be able to say "hey, here's how to access the DB. Remember that." Or better yet, for it to happen automatically. That's agentic memory.

yea ofcourse you have tell agent how to access you database. But why does it have a specail name, what the big deal about giving agent info how to call your db.

You’re right, we should manually tell every agent everything they need to know upfront at the start of every session.

Re: Agent memory as a file format

#69
> Markdown "pages", with

> (optional) YAML frontmatter and

> (optional) SQLite vector index for semantic search

This is basically exactly what I use in a MCP service I built and it works pretty well. Can be enriched further if you use a storage system like S3 and take advantage of metadata.

"harness managed" memory is utter garbage, I am convinced, and I disable it immediately. The major problem being over time it degrades and sneaks in conflicting or outright false information. Then one day you'll swear it's drunk, and every time I got to this state and investigated, auto managed memory was always the problem.

Re: Agent memory as a file format

#70

It occurs to me: we have latent embedding giving 'general knowledge' to an LLM. What if we use a 'blank' LLM as well as an agent and train that blank LLM on personal context to query that as memory?

Can an LLM be trained to understand language without remembering anything else from its training data? I thought the intrinsic knowledge and the ability to understand language were tied together.
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