Tired of onboarding your agent every session? Building a memory system to fix the problem? Here's a guide to some things you should be thinking about when designing your system.

There are a ton AI memory solutions that have been created. For reference, you can see a comparison assembled by carsteneu on GitHub (link in the comments). There are 74 systems and I'm sure the list is a tiny fraction of what is out there. Almost all of them suffer the same flaw... They treat memory like a bolt on search index. That approach has little respect for the context window, how it works, or how agent performance degrades when its not managed properly. I've been reading "Permanent Present Tense" by Suzanne Corkin, and it helped me realize what is missing from all the memory solutions that are out there. The book is about an anterograde amnesiac name Henry Molaison whose memory problems were identical to AI agents. Henry had an operation that removed parts of his brain and afterward couldn't form new long term memories. He could maintain a conversation with you when you, but if you exited and re-entered the room he would treat you as if you had never met. Simply put, whats missing for anterograde amnesiacs like Henry and Claude Code is not just long term memory. Its's working memory; which is a system of processes working together in service of a goal. Any memory solution lacking those processes is going to fail you. I've written a longer form blog post on dev(dot)to if you want to go deeper (link in the comments) Otherwise, if your designing agent memory then I highly recommend the that you research the following: - The different types of long-term memory (declarative & non-declarative) - Working memory - The Central Executive (process) - The Episodic Buffer (process) - Top Down Processing (process) Without those things any memory solution is just a search engine and that problem was solved over 60 years ago.